When Halo Infinite came out three months ago, it saw huge success, as it became the biggest launch in Halo franchise history. No wonder; it’s the first mainline Halo shooter in six years, and also the first one to feature a free-to-play multiplayer mode — a combination of factors that presumably led to a cosmic launch.
Since then, however, the game’s popularity has been gradually declining. It is no longer in Xbox's top five most played games list and its concurrent playership on Steam went down by 90%. Needless to say, the game’s viewership trend followed a similar trajectory.
Overall viewership statistics
Disclaimer: Only data collected from November 15th 2021 to February 27th 2022 have been included in the statistics.
Since the release of Halo Infinite back in November, the game attracted 19.39K Average Viewers who generated a total of 46.93M Hours Watched. The total Air Time accounted for 2.4K hours.
The category’s highest peak accounted for 265K concurrent viewers, while the channels peak, which occurred during the second day after the release, reached 9.96K Twitch channels that concurrently broadcasted Halo Infinite.
The official Halo Twitch channel ended up being the most watched with a total of 5.72M Hours Watched, which is 12.19% of the discipline’s total HW. FORMAL was next with 2M Hours Watched (4.46% of the total HW), followed by Snip3down, summit1g, Luciid_TW and cloakzy.
Fading hype
Despite the impressive viewership in the first days after Halo Infinite’s release, it didn’t take too long until the hype dispersed and the numbers started swiftly falling. While the game amassed 9.12M Hours Watched on Twitch during the first week after its release, by the third week, its viewership dropped by more than a half. By the most recent, 15th week, its HW count was down to 682K (92.5% decline).
The average viewership went down gradually, starting at 55.95K AV in the first week and decreasing by more than a half during the third week after the game’s release. The 15th week saw 4.5K Average Viewers tuning in to Halo Infinite broadcasts.
Among the channels that saw the best viewership results broadcasting Halo Infinite during the first two weeks after its release were summit1g, xQcOW, CDNThe3rd, Halo and SamsungUS. The top streamer (by HW) during this time was Snip3down, who in 82 hours of streaming the title accumulated over 628.47K Hours Watched (4% of the total HW generated in the first two weeks).
Most watched streamers for 1-2 weeks after release and for 14-15 weeks
At the end of the monitored period (weeks 14 and 15), the list of best performing channels featured the official Halo channel at the top again with 420.47K Hours Watched (22.22% of the total HW generated in weeks 14 and 15). The top 5 also included FORMAL, TurboTax, Luciid_TW and the official Xbox channel.
Language distribution
As for the language distribution, the dominant language of broadcast among the audience of Halo Infinite during the first 15 weeks after its release was English, which accounted for 87.52% of the total Hours Watched. The second was Spanish, followed by French, German and Russian.
The revival of Halo esports
Although the Halo Infinite's popularity took a declining course over the weeks after its release, it was most likely the result of the fading hype, as it’s common for most of the newly released titles. With the start of week 6, the game’s viewership settled between 1-2 million weekly Hours Watched and remained within this range for 10 weeks.
The statistics also show two considerable spikes in Halo Infinite's viewership, which occurred during the Halo Championship Series (HCS) events in weeks 5 and 13. This was an expected outcome, given that the game’s developer 343 Industries decided to bring back also Halo esports, once a popular esports circuit, especially in the North American region.
Based on the first viewership results, the new Halo esports ecosystem seems to be something that Halo fans have been waiting for since 2018 when the last HCS events were held. The first official Halo Infinite event, the HCS Kickoff Major Raleigh 2021 attracted 11 times more concurrent viewers and 13 times more average viewers than the HCS 2018 Finals.
During week 5, when the Major in Raleigh was held, the Halo Infinite's viewership spiked to reach 6.74M Hours Watched and 40K Average Viewers, taking the discipline’s viewership back to levels from the first two weeks of the title being out. The discipline’s highest peak of 265K concurrent viewers was also achieved during this time.
The following major HCS Anaheim 2022 saw a notably lower viewership, yet still high enough to cause a spike of 2.34M Hours Watched and 14K Average Viewers during week 13 and a spike of 119K Peak Viewers during week 14.
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All in all, the statistics provided indicate that the official Halo esports circuit plays an imperative role in the title’s popularity and will likely be the factor that will keep the discipline thriving at least for a while. Potentially, HCS could compete for viewership with the Call of Duty League (CDL) which currently sees a notable decrease in viewership compared to the last season.
Although the HCS’s viewership is still considerably lower, some of the biggest HCS events are already starting to reach numbers comparable to those of CDL. Moreover, while CDL is a YouTube exclusive, HCS is more flexible in terms of broadcasting since it is streamed across multiple different platforms. Given the declining trend in CDL’s popularity, the Halo Championship Series might realistically be on its way to overshadow the CDL. With that being said, only time will tell whether this proves to be true.
