so we are to assume that halo only grew massive do to luck and there is NOTHING the developer could have done to make Halo maintain its desirability in comparison to other franchises on the market?
That's outlandish.
How can you argue that MW ate Halo 3s lunch when H3 had been on the market for 2 years and barely even moved when MW launched?
No, I'm not saying Halo was popular only because of luck. It was popular on its own merits, and was a fuckton better than its competition initially... but Halo
couldn't improve at the rate the other games did. If Halo was at a 9/10 in terms of potential, then games like Battlefield and COD were about 6/10.. and when they're all 9/10, Halo isn't going to be the average player's first choice. COD4 shot to the number 2 spot immediately, and whilst Halo 3 being older had
already shed a lot of its earlier audience. These players would be making up COD4's numbers, and they became MW2 players.
Of course, I'm not suggesting there was
nothing Halo could have done to remain popular... like I said, it very could be Destiny today, just named Halo... that probably would have worked. What I'm saying though, is how divorced from the original template do you think makes sense to go in this pursuit? 343i catches enough shit for the more minor changes they already made. If Halo 2 was Ghost Recon Island Thunder... is a Ghost Recon Wildlands the sort of change you'd want by Halo 5?
Trends are trends for a reason... it's because to most people the trend IS the improvement. ADS is an improvement, loadouts are an improvement, sprint is an improvement, killstreaks are an improvement, objectives are an improvement, RPG systems are an improvement, etc. Call of Duty, Battlefield and Destiny all represent what the average person considers to be an improvement to Halo... any Halo.
In terms of 'improvement' I'm talking about the developers ability to design a game that the market finds compelling. MW compelled more purchases than MW2, so forth and so on. The market found IW to be much less compelling that Blops3. And this is not simply a function of setting or mechanics, but the entire package in relation to other offerings on the market.
Halo Reach was less compelling to Halo fans than H3. It also failed to compel new fans at a rate to offset new interest in franchises like COD and Battlefield. (Mind you BF also saw doubled its installed base during Reaches timeframe)
But look at those "more compelling CODs"... Black Ops 2 becomes backwards compatible and it becomes the second most played game on XBL again. Infinite Warfare bundles the original Modern Warfare (which you say couldn't touch Halo) and it storms the XBL chart also... but no ability to play any older Halo games does that in any form. In MCC Halo 4 consistently murders the older games for votes. The people that made Halo 2 and 3 so big simply don't play Halo anymore at all.. they're just gone. For many of them Halo was their game simply because the other games didn't exist in their modern form yet.
edit: I fully reject the notion that the core Halo formula was doomed to short term popularity, while the BF and COD formulas were inherently future proof. Those games just did a better job at anticipating what gamers would want from them next.
I'm not actually claiming that either Battlefield or CODs formulas are future-proof... they're just current. Games could trend away from the mechanics of either at any point, and they could become something completely different, or fall out of favour... COD has already done that in the past with Modern Warfare, and then in reaction to Titanfall this generation. An honest answer to what gamers would have wanted from Halo next, is quite likely something that isn't Halo at all.
