Halo: Campaign Evolved, a ground-up remake of the original 2001 Halo's single-player campaign, is a visual and technical triumph, but its lack of PvP maps is a big letdown for people like me: 30-somethings with extremely fond memories of mowing down friends in Warthogs while guzzling Mountain Dew. In fact, that demographic is the reason Halo: Campaign Evolved is seriously lagging behind recent ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 on PS5, argues one prominent industry analyst.
Alinea Analytics' Rhys Elliott recently broke down the numbers for Halo: Campaign Evolved's launch, which saw an almost exactly even split of 42% Xbox players and 41% PS5 players. The game has reportedly sold 1.2 million copies (544 thousand on PlayStation) and earned Halo Studios $67 million in gross revenue in the two weeks it's been available, which Elliott calls "a soft performance for a ground-up remake of one of the most iconic console shooter."
Compare that to Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2, whose PS5 ports launched a little over a month ago, and there's a pretty decisive favorite. The two 1080p ports (not remasters or remakes) have sold a combined 12 million on PS5 in the month they've been available, with Black Ops 2 taking up the lion's share at 8.9 million copies sold.
"So two 15-year-old CoD ports outsold a remake of the iconic Halo 1 on PS5 by more than 16-to-1, at a lower price, and with worse graphics. And the difference is a key one: PvP," argues Elliott, pointing out that only 21.7% of Black Ops 2 players on PS5 have even started the campaign.
"PlayStation players clearly bought BO2 for the multiplayer, for the nostalgia of those lobbies, the killstreaks, and harkening back to a different, less predatory era of online shenanigans.
"This is in stark contrast to Campaign Evolved, which is campaign-only (co-op too, to be fair), but no competitive multiplayer at all. Except for CoD, Halo is arguably the most multiplayer-defining console franchise in history. Split-screen Halo and LAN parties are a foundational memory for exactly the 30-something demographic this remake was chasing."
It's hard to say whether competitive multiplayer would've been enough to completely close the gap between Halo: Campaign Evolved and the Black Ops ports in terms of raw sales – Call of Duty is a global juggernaut whose annual releases are reliable cash cows while Halo hasn't seen a fully new installment since 2021's Halo Infinite – but I'm definitely not alone in my disappointment that it isn't there.
