What exactly is the discussion about? Are we speaking strictly sales? Impact? Awards?
Halo was (and still is) in a rough shape but it's more well known.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
So is Splatoon the biggest first-party shooter now?
- Thread starter Stowaway Silfer
- Start date
- Status
Halo was (and still is) in a rough shape but it's more well known.
OP
OP
For Splatoon 2 I'm looking at its sales. 13 million bought this thing, simple. For Halo we've got nothing concrete besides that 20 million downloads thing cause apparently the exact numbers we have of it clearly not being a success on Steam past launch in its first season aren't supposed to count cause apparently turns out being big on Steam wasn't that important. What would you look at to say that clearly Infinite is a bigger success?
It's not about it being F2P. It's about Halo Infinite having nothing officially confirmed that says "this game is bigger than that game 13.3 million people bought at or close to full-price". We don't know how much it has made, and "20 million" downloads isn't big enough to be more impressive than what Splatoon 2 did and I'd think that would be obvious.
People can say in clear terms "Uncharted 4 is a bigger game and a bigger success than Splatoon 2" because you can simply point to it having made $1B, which Splatoon 2 clearly has not. Similarly, you wouldn't see me being unconvinced that F2P Fortnite is bigger than Splatoon 2 cause the game made like $9B in 2-3 years. Halo doesn't have that. It doesn't have anything you can clearly relate to Splatoon 2 and say "oh this is a bigger success than Splatoon 2". On its own terms, separate from this conversation of 1st party shooters, Halo Infinite doesn't even seem like it was a big success past the first two months.
I'm not even sure any of the past Halo games sold much better than Splatoon 2. The series was at 81 million sales total as of Feb. 2021. Even if we chose to pretend the re-releases and spin-offs didn't exist and just divided that number by the 6 mainline FPSes (H1-5 and Reach), we'd still get an average of 13.5M per game, which Splatoon 2 would pass pretty soon.
You can join casual games together, but the matchmaking might pit you against one another. However, for ranked, you can easily team up in 2- or 4-player groups.
If the point of the thread is just to decide on the biggest first party shooter, then we need to define what we mean by "biggest". Being vague about that is likely gonna lead to confusion. If you're talking about biggest sales, then Uncharted 4 is a little bigger. If you're talking about number of players, then either Uncharted 4 or Halo Infinite is likely bigger (depending on what we assume the average sale to number of players ratio is). Ifwe're talking about sheer mindshare, then I think Halo is still the biggest purely from how closely it has been tied to XBox as a brand for 2 decades.
If this is just a stealth thread to point out that Nintendo's last first party shooter was more well received than Halo Infinite seems to be right now, then fair enough, but we may have enough threads complaining about the state of Halo Infinite at this point.
All that being said, Splatoon is still an undeniable success to a degree that no one would've expected, and the fact that other companies have slightly "bigger" shooters doesn't take away from that.
If this is just a stealth thread to point out that Nintendo's last first party shooter was more well received than Halo Infinite seems to be right now, then fair enough, but we may have enough threads complaining about the state of Halo Infinite at this point.
All that being said, Splatoon is still an undeniable success to a degree that no one would've expected, and the fact that other companies have slightly "bigger" shooters doesn't take away from that.
OP
OP
I feel I've been pretty clear at this point that I'm looking for what has made the most money, given that all these games aren't being released and supported in the same way. We've settled that Uncharted and The Last of Us are both definitely bigger successes but 5 pages in, there's yet to be any strong indication that Halo Infinite is a more successful product than Splatoon 2, just a bunch of people coming in to say "lol but Halo" like the series is obviously still at its peak (a peak that itself purely in terms of unit sales, doesn't have any of its games looking much better than Splatoon 2 even with the most charitable interpretation of the numbers we have).
Like I said, we can see how Infinite does in the future. I believe it has the potential to become a big success, especially with its Battle Royale mode. But until then there's nothing too convincing to work with here if all people have is "lol but Halo" and "20 million downloads".
Last edited:
I understand some people have differing interpretations as evidenced by the posts in the thread but surely the meaning of biggest here is mindshare.
Otherwise OP would've said 'best-selling' or asked for the highest player-count.
Has to be Halo in that case then maybe Splatoon 2.
----
Ok definitely wrong then OP is talking a out what's made the most money, yeah that's a little harder to ascertain.
We don't actually know that Halo 4 and 5 sold way less than the original 3 actually. I'd say it's quite safe to assume they sold less than Halo 3, which I'd see as the series peak in regards to popularity, but Halo 4 for example was the fastest selling Halo game out of the gate (including Halo 3).
Now, I think it's safe to say that it's long-term tail wouldn't be as strong as Halo 3, because the MP wasn't as well received and Call of Duty ruled the world by then. But people do have a tendency to massively lowball Halo post-343i simply because it's no longer the top dog. Halo 5 was also reported as having sold in line with previous series entries... though the market shift to digital, and it being release prior to NPD factoring in digital sales makes it a lot less clear where it would've stood. The series sales didn't crater in the manner that people tend to imply however. Halo 5 was reportedly over 5m within 3 months from launch. There are just games that are much bigger these days.
There is alternatively nothing that says that Splatoon is bigger by having sold 13m copies in 5 years than a game that was played (not downloaded... played) by over 20 million players within the first 2 months. You're acting as though everyone that bought Splatoon 2 played it actively. I own Splatoon 2. I bought it at launch, as I had few titles for my Switch at the time, and had recently been lttp on the original game. I've played it for maybe 5 hours total in all those years. A sale is a sale, but if we're talking player retention, there is very little reason to believe Splatoon is currently played by more people than Halo. Hell, I'm not even sure how strong a case there would be for that pre-Infinite due to MCC + 5.
There is basically no question that Halo 4 sold over 13m within the same window of time as Splatoon 2, and that was the Halo game with the absolute lowest player retention in the series. It's nowhere near the measure of popularity you're arguing it to be.
In regards to how much Halo has made Halo 4 reportedly brought in $300m in its opening week. If we were to assume all 13m copies of Splatoon 2 were bought for $60, with none being bought at a reduced price, or being bundled with the Switch (which happened quite heavily, so I'm not sure why you tried to level this against UC4...), you'd arrive at $780m in raw revenue from sales... in 5 years, vs Halo 4's $300m opening week. Halo 5 despite lower sales was reported to be the Halo game with comfortably the highest revenue, as a result of MTX with stuff like REQs for Warzone.
As mentioned before, Halo isn't top dog anymore, but that's largely down to just how insanely large some games have become in recent years as the market has expanded. Back in Halo 2's days, 13m puts you amongst the biggest games in existence. Today Borderlands does that with its eyes closed and Elden Ring manages it in a month. The raw sales of Splatoon are impressive, but nowhere near to the extent you're painting them to be, and is precisely why a historical juggernaut like Halo is making a move towards f2p (along with even the current genre king CoD)... because there's simply more money to be made there.
Splatoon 2 has nothing you can cite that points to it being clearly bigger than Halo either. If anything there is only any evidence pointing towards the opposite (Halo being played by more players). I think you'd probably be very hard pressed to find anything that indicates that Splatoon makes more money than Halo, because at the end of the day, Splatoon isn't a game design around its live service revenue, which multiple publishers have cited in recent years as being far more lucrative than initial sales, hence why the model is becoming the new norm amongst gaming's biggest IP.
Last edited:
There's not really any way to find out the money made from Halo Infinite because we don't know the revenue from non-GP unit sales and MTX or the number of game pass subs the game is responsible for (untangling this cost is impossible without lots of internal data from MS).
This is the case for every Xbox first party title that has launched into game pass and will be the case going forward.
OP
OP
Ehh I doubt Infinite has made more yet even with its model considering if you were to assume that somehow all 20 million of its players had bought both battle passes, that still wouldn't be as much as what Splatoon 2 has likely made across its copies sold + its expansion. But yeah I know games make more money with micro transactions than without them lol, that's why at this point I at least want to see that the games that had those made more than the game than doesn't even have em before talking about them being bigger successes.
(We don't even need to get into what Splatoon would make if it was monetized similarly cause I'm tired now and not that interested in it at this point and don't even wanna give Nintendo ideas lol)
Fair points though. I will say that the opening week numbers that H4's opening numbers don't make that strong of a case here considering that Splatoon 2 almost made as much in its first quarter at 3.61M sales on a platform with a much smaller install base at the time (though now I'm curious about how Splatoon 3 does in comparison since it's also launching late into a console's life) but whatever, H5 REQ packs were indeed big and it wouldn't be surprising for it to have made more with those contributing. Thank you.
- Status