Robocopsicle

343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise.

Agreed 100%. Halo 4 was the beginning of the end for Halo, imo. I thought Reach was fun, but I was never a big fan of the sprinting, armor classes and weapon bloom. It still felt like Halo overall, though. I remember playing Halo 4 on launch day and immediately being disappointed. I still probably put 100+ hours into it at the time, but I remember thinking it didn't truly feel like Halo — at least not like its predecessors.

I think specifically in the case of Halo, the surprise is because it was such a powerhouse of a franchise in the 2000s into early 2010s. Halo was the Fortnite and Apex Legends before Fortnite and Apex Legends in terms of player retention.

Halo 2 and 3 had thriving playerbases for years after release. Infinite came out just over 1.5 years ago and has already lost almost all of its players. The Master Chief Collection currently has more players than Infinite with 5,200 to Infinite's 3,000 on Steam.

I spent countless hours in high school playing Halo 3, and even a few years after release, you'd have hundreds of thousands of players online. Two years after release in October 2009, Halo 3 had close to 759,000 players online in the span of 24 hours, plus about 129,000 playing ODST, which had just come out a month prior.

I'm not a fan of gaming as a service, but it clearly can be a successful business model for sustained success, so you'd think that one of the most iconic gaming franchises of all time would be able to harness that.

I think I'm just going to hang onto the app as a keepsake. I can spare the 75mb or so of storage space haha.

I think I've posted more on Lemmy in the past 24 hours than I did in the past year on Reddit. It feels way less like shouting into the void.

I think so, too. The comment sections remind me a lot of Reddit's when I first joined in early 2013 — more thoughtful comments and less shitposting to get the most upvotes.

It seems like the biggest hurdle is going to be getting the more niche communities going on Lemmy.

Granted I used Sync and not RiF (though I initially used RiF from like 2013-2015), but it looks so weird seeing the green Liftoff logo on my home screen, which has been largely unchanged for the past 8 years since I started using Sync.