While Halo: Campaign Evolved represents a tremendous landmark for the entire franchise, being the first in the series to come to a PlayStation platform, it looks like its sales on the PS5 have been less-than-stellar. According to a report by Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliot, the title only managed to sell around 351,000 copies on PS5. When compared to other games sold in the month of July, Halo: Campaign Evolved came in ninth place.
Elliot even brought up the fact that sales charts for the month on Sony’s platform were dominated by the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2, which seemingly sold 3 million and 8.2 million copies, respectively, overshadowing any success Halo: Campaign Evolved may have seen. He speculates that the pricing for Campaign Evolved may have been a major factor for this.
“Halo: Campaign Evolved, the ground-up graphical remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, had a notably slow start on PlayStation, which stings even more next to the success of two effort-light CoD ports. Halo sold 351K copies on PS5 in July and 452K on PlayStation to date (almost $28M). $60 was WAY too much for this one,” he explained.
“And for comparison, Halo has sold through 212K on Steam and around 900K on Xbox (console and PC). One can’t help wondering what could have been if Halo had kept the trajectory it had around Halo 3 and Reach. A remake of the game that started it all landing this softly on a new platform makes me pretty sad, as a Halo fan.”
Other games to have outsold Halo: Campaign Evolved on PS5 in July are Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced (1.6 million), EA Sports FC 26 (1.3 million), EA Sports College Football 27 (1.1 million), Grand Theft Auto 5 (846,000), Minecraft (501,000), and Palworld (479,000). This indicates that the month’s theme for PlayStation users may have been nostalgia.
“July’s PS5 chart, then, is clearly all about nostalgia and the catalogue. A proven, beloved old game, dropped at the right moment and, just as importantly, at the right price, can out-earn almost anything new and buy a bit of breathing room in the slate. CoD got it. Halo didn’t. Fifty dollars for what’s essentially a graphical touch-up of a 2001 game was always going to be a hard sell, and players clearly weren’t having it.”
Halo: Campaign Evolved was released last month on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Despite it being the first entry in the franchise to come to PlayStation, our graphical analysis indicated that there was little difference between the two console versions in terms of visuals and performance. However, when bringing the PS5 Pro into the mix, we discovered that the more powerful console was able to pull ahead of its contemporaries in both Quality and Performance modes, with PSSR 2 offering features like better image reconstruction.
The PC version, on the other hand, was the best platform when it came to scalability, giving players a wider range of options not only for control schemes, but also for visual and frame rate settings. For more details about Halo: Campaign Evolved, check out our review.
