The number of Halo Infinite Steam players doubles after Season 5 launches

Halo Infinite is enjoying a modest comeback following the release of Season 5: Reckoning.

The first-person shooter from developer 343 Industries has been hovering around the 7,000 concurrent player mark on Valve’s platform in the lead-up to Season 5’s launch this week. SteamDB, then Halo Infinite rose on October 18 with 18,000 concurrent. This is the highest peak for the game since Season 2 launched about 17 months ago, and there are enough players for Halo Infinite to crack the top 50 most played games on Steam based on concurrents.

It should be noted that the only tangible player data we have comes from Steam. Microsoft does not publish official Halo Infinite cross-platform statistics. But we do know that Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is in the top 50 most popular Xbox games right now, he confirmed Microsoft Store. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite returned to the list of Steam’s top 100 best-selling games by revenue at No. 24, indicating that people are spending money on the new battle pass within the free-to-download multiplayer FPS.

It’s a modest bump that may grow more as the weekend approaches, but Halo Infinite is still far from its all-time peak on Steam of 272,586 concurrent players, which was set nearly two years ago when the game debuted.

Halo Infinite fell hard after launch as disgruntled players abandoned the game due to poor progression and monetization systems and missing modes. 343 also made a number of controversial decisions, including eliminating split-screen multiplayer. The Forge mode itself didn’t arrive until a year after launch, along with the online co-op campaign. It appears that 343 has left the Halo Infinite campaign behind as well. In June, 343 announced that it had canceled seasonal, story-driven cutscenes in Halo Infinite, news that came after major layoffs at the studio.

“As we refined our top priorities and shifted resources internally this year, we had to make the decision to abandon seasonal narrative cutscenes to make room for the team to continue focusing on much-needed features, content, and improvements for Halo Infinite.” 343 said at the time.

The reference to “moved resources” may have been a reference to the layoffs that affected them Earlier this year and Halo Infinite director Joseph Staten was seen leaving the developer. 343 had to clarify that “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay.” After the layoffs, it said it would “continue developing Halo now and into the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great.”

The developer is reportedly working on a new Halo project, codenamed Tatanka, built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine rather than Slipspace’s in-house engine.

While the Halo community waits to find out what’s next for the franchise, sentiment toward Infinite has slowly changed, with players saying it’s in a decent place. Fans reacted positively to season five in particular.

User-created mode Forge has enjoyed a major update as part of the season that adds a new AI toolkit to help players create more content, including PvPvE content. With Forge, players can now create specific AI from the campaign to populate their own custom game creation, and the community is really enjoying pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Wesley is IGN’s UK news editor. You can find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].