Sort of... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, October 29, 2015, 19:06 (3408 days ago) @ Schedonnardus

But surely some of the Halo games (especially Halo 3) could "phone home" and deliver usage information to Bungie. Bungie then would have some idea of how much and how often people played these games. Maybe your anecdotal evidence doesn't hold true for a vast majority of the population.

I remember when Microsoft used to publish their weekly "most played" lists. Halo 2 was always on top, even after the 360 came out. After several months of a 3 year old game dominating the new stuff, MS starting splitting the lists between the Xbox and the Xbox 360.

I would say that Bungie had succeeded in making a game that people would come back to, without having to resort to dangling carrots.

We need to couch this info a little bit. First of all, we need to remember that as recently as 2011(ish... might have been 2010) only about 50% of all Xbox 360s were connected to the internet. So "most played Xbox Live game" is already not representative of the "majority" of Xbox gamers.

We also need to remember that this was back in the days when there was very little competition for Halo 2.

Most people who buy a game play a handful of hours and never go back. Halo has always enjoyed a more dedicated fan base, but the long-term player base is still just a fraction of total sales.