Over the past few years I've gathered all the available Halo population data. The purpose was to gather all that data to one place. In the process I ended up writing a short analysis on the population trends of Halo, which also works on issues such as the incompatibility of the population data of Halo 4 with prior games. Back then I was hoping I could've added Halo 5 population data in the future, but that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore. Anyway, I think it's finally time for me to share the data and hope it'll alleviate some of the uncertainty and misconceptions regarding the population trends of Halo.
Here's the analysis article
It's an attempt to take an objective look at the historical trends of Halo's popularity and what really happened. It doesn't hold much surprises, but there are some interesting details. It also explains some of the reasons why and how I did this whole project, and where the data came from.
I also made some additional graphs of the populations of the different games and comparisons between them:
Halo 2 24 hour unique user counts
Halo 3 24 hour UU counts
Halo Reach 24 hour UU counts
Halo 4 24 hour UU counts (estimate)
Comparison of the absolute 24 hour UU values
Comparison of 24 hour UU counts normalized to launch day values
Comparison of 24 hour UU counts normalized to maximum values
Update 2017/8/28
Inspired by this thread asking when did CoD become more popular than Halo, I decided to gather some data from Major Nelson's old Live activity charts to create a graph of Halo's placement on said charts throughout the years, compared to CoD. As this offers insight into the population trends of Halo in relation to other games, I thought it would be a good idea to also include it here.
XBL activity chart placements of Halo games in relation to CoD games
Update 2020/3/23
I made an updated version of the article (or more accurately, I rewrote it in its entirety because I wasn't happy). Not that anyone cares, but I care. There's some new stuff, but no MCCPC data yet because I don't think there's enough of it. I prefer doing the analysis when it's not relevant anymore anyway.
I also realized I had never actually put out the numerical data I have, which is a bit ironic, so here is a ZIP of all the data: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PJ7s_6h1u5iAAIT_w6A_2F0GpykJouZ9/view. It's an inconsistent mix if plain text files where some are CSV, and others use spaces as separators.
Here's the analysis article
It's an attempt to take an objective look at the historical trends of Halo's popularity and what really happened. It doesn't hold much surprises, but there are some interesting details. It also explains some of the reasons why and how I did this whole project, and where the data came from.
I also made some additional graphs of the populations of the different games and comparisons between them:
Halo 2 24 hour unique user counts
Halo 3 24 hour UU counts
Halo Reach 24 hour UU counts
Halo 4 24 hour UU counts (estimate)
Comparison of the absolute 24 hour UU values
Comparison of 24 hour UU counts normalized to launch day values
Comparison of 24 hour UU counts normalized to maximum values
Update 2017/8/28
Inspired by this thread asking when did CoD become more popular than Halo, I decided to gather some data from Major Nelson's old Live activity charts to create a graph of Halo's placement on said charts throughout the years, compared to CoD. As this offers insight into the population trends of Halo in relation to other games, I thought it would be a good idea to also include it here.
XBL activity chart placements of Halo games in relation to CoD games
Update 2020/3/23
I made an updated version of the article (or more accurately, I rewrote it in its entirety because I wasn't happy). Not that anyone cares, but I care. There's some new stuff, but no MCCPC data yet because I don't think there's enough of it. I prefer doing the analysis when it's not relevant anymore anyway.
I also realized I had never actually put out the numerical data I have, which is a bit ironic, so here is a ZIP of all the data: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PJ7s_6h1u5iAAIT_w6A_2F0GpykJouZ9/view. It's an inconsistent mix if plain text files where some are CSV, and others use spaces as separators.