Since its release two weeks ago, Halo: Campaign Evolved has sold 1.2M copies, 42% Xbox (console and PC, with Game Pass upsells removed from our copies sold data), 41% PlayStation, and 17% Steam, for $67M in gross revenue.
Like most (though no longer all…) Xbox first-party games, Halo launched straight into Game Pass, with 2.1M players jumping in via a subscription across console and PC, and under 600K forking out the extra $20 for the premium pass to play up to five days early. Cannibalised sales.
Needless to say, that’s a soft performance for a remake of one of the most iconic console shooters – nay, one of the most iconic shooters full stop.
Why did Campaign Evolved sell so softly on Steam?
Steam is easiest to work out. Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a compilation of the core Halo games with online multiplayer included, is on Steam for $40, cheaper than Campaign Evolved’s $50 for the campaign only (plus a few bonus missions and a visual polish).
MCC has regularly dipped to $10, though not for almost four months now, probably a deliberate move to prop up Campaign Evolved’s slim value prop. No dice.
Campaign Evolved sold just 232K copies on Steam for $9.3M. And the audience data shows who forked out. About 80% of Steam buyers had already played The Master Chief Collection on Steam, 64% Halo Infinite, and 16% Halo Wars.
Our Steam review-sentiment analysis found that:
The price is too high for a port like this one, and the Halo brand – candidly – has lost a lot of cache (I loved Halo Infinite, for the record, and feel that a bit of revisionist history has happened there).
The value prop is too low (no competitive multiplayer, and the bonus missions were unpolished).
A lot of Steam users already own MCC (8.5M copies sold on Steam, as per our estimates), which offers bang for your buck.
On the positive side, players enjoyed Campaign Evolved’s visual overhaul (I agree that the lighting, textures, and character models modernise the OG), and agree the core campaign and level design hold up, with sensible quality-of-life tweaks.
Campaign Evolved is good, make no mistake. But good doesn’t cut it in today’s market, especially priced against a cheaper, meatier offering.
The first Halo on PlayStation didn’t make a splash
Campaign Evolved sold 544K-ish copies on PlayStation for $32M, a bit under the Xbox (console and Windows) number, despite PS5’s bigger install base. The higher price was a factor here as mentioned, but also the Xbox faithful were more primed for this than PlayStation owners were.
That said, plenty of PS5 players jumped in for novelty and a nostalgia hit. It makes sense, as plenty of Xbox 360 owners in the West went to PS4 after the horrific Xbox One launch. There’s a cohort of PlayStation players, 32-to-40-year-olds, who grew up on Halo and never forgot it.
You can see them clearly in the PlayStation audience overlap – the shared number of unique players between Campaign Evolved and other games. The top 10 is milenial and gen X fodder, that late-PS2, Xbox 360, and early-PS4 era:
Gears of War Reloaded (7.1% overlap)
Doom: The Dark Ages (5.2%)
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced (4.3%)
Borderlands 4 (4.3%)
Oblivion Remastered (4.2%)
Starfield (4.1%)
Pragmata (4.0%)
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection (3.7%)
Marathon (3.6%)
Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater (3.5%).
So yeah, shooters, remakes, and legacy-leaning titles galore. This resonated with older, nostalgia-driven crowd rather than pulling in a fresh PlayStation audience.
The awkward Black Ops comp
Meanwhile, two 1080p ports, not even remakes, of the Black Ops games have now sold a combined 12M-plus on PS5 (Black Ops 2 at 8.9M, Black Ops 1 at 3.3M).
So two 15-year-old CoD ports outsold a remake of the iconic Halo 1 on PS5 by more than 16-to-1, at a lower price, and with worse graphics. And the difference is a key one: PvP
At the time of writing, just 21.7% of Black Ops 2 players on PS5 have even started the campaign, while 14.1% have finished the first mission and 8.2% the third.
PlayStation players bought BO2 for the multiplayer, then, for the nostalgia of those lobbies, the killstreaks, and reminiscing about a different, less predatory era of online shenanigans.
This is a contrast to Campaign Evolved, which is campaign-only (co-op too, to be fair), but no competitive multiplayer. Except for CoD, Halo is arguably the most multiplayer-defining console franchise ever. Split-screen Halo and LAN parties are a foundational memory for exactly the 30-something demographic this remake was chasing.
A Master Chief Collection release on PS5, multiplayer and all, would certainly have done far better than this campaign-only remake did. At the very least, if the rumoured Halo 2 remake ships with online multiplayer, it’ll sell a great deal more, assuming it comes to PlayStation at all.
Anyway, from cautionary tale to a happier one…
The new Spider-Man film gave Spider-Man 2 on PS5 and Steam a massive lift
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has sold another 335K copies since Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit cinemas on 30 July, generating $12M across PS5 and Steam in under two weeks. About 20% of the film-window PS5 copies were physical, and another 300K-plus players jumped in for the first time via PlayStation Plus.
This carries on the trend we flagged with The Odyssey reviving Assassin’s Creed Odyssey recently, except this time the IP actually matches the film exactly.
In total, Spidey 2 has slung its way to 18.3M copies sold (92%+ on PS5) and over $1.2 billion (!!!) since launching nearly three years ago. This past weekend it topped 1M daily active users for the first time since launch week, roughly 2.6x its pre-film daily engagement.
Some clever discounting helped, but the film did the heavy lifting. On PS5, Spider-Man 2 had the same $29.39 sale price during a February promotion and during this film window. The February sale moved 6.3Kish copies a day. The film window is moving 15K a day at that identical price, 2.4x on average, peaking at 4.5x on the biggest day.
As you can see in the Alinea platform screenshot below, Steam is similar. At $40.19, the film period helped the game drive 2.3x what the same $40.19 discount managed back in June.
This is one of the clearest transmedia halo (lol) effects we’ve ever measured, and it’s still a largely untapped. Right now these lifts happen mostly by accident, as Brand New Day landed almost three years after the game.
If a platform holder or publisher deliberately aligned a major game and a film to land in proximity, the SyNeRgIeS would be nuts.
The catch, of course, is that game (and film) development cycles are unpredictable. Syncing two multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar productions to swing in together is a logistical nightmare.
But for the handful of companies making both films and games in the same IP, the console platform holders, WB, and the like, surely one of these has to line up eventually.
Sony and Nintendo are best placed there. I’d kill to see that impact measured on a launch that was actually planned.
Cool links and other stuff
We actually did a Twitter and LinkedIn post about Spidey’s success yesterday, and it’s already been picked up by the lovely folks at IGN, GameSpot, and Eurogamer
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I agree that Halo: Campaign Evolved releasing without multiplayer (which should be an executable offense, good God XBOX, do you KNOW why people like that franchise?) definitely curbed its sales in comparison to the COD remasters.
That said, I also think that, culturally, Halo's time has come and gone. If you're someone who has grown up with COD and never played the original Halo, would it look attractive to you? Would the campaign even be interesting given the spectacle and scope of what you've grown up on? Or would it, despite the fancy graphics, feel like the product of a bygone time?