True to recent rumours, yesterday, Microsoft and 343 Industries surprised people by shadow dropping Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer component in celebration of Xbox’s (and Halo’s) 20th anniversary, over three weeks ahead of the game’s intended launch. And as you may have expected, people have been flocking to the game in droves to get a taste of the action.
Apparently, Halo Infinite hit a peak concurrent player count of 272,856 on Steam on its launch day. As pointed out by Niko Partners’ senior analyst Daniel Ahmad on Twitter, that makes it Xbox Game Studios’ most successful game ever on Steam, putting it ahead of the likes of Halo: The Master Chief Collection and the recently-released Forza Horizon 5, which managed about 161,000 and 81,000 respectively. One would imagine that the coming days will see that number going higher- especially with the game’s campaign still yet to launch.
Speaking of which, Halo Infinite’s campaign will launch for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One on December 8.