Halo Infinite got 100,000 players on Steam in under an hour, attracted 272,000 in its first night
Halo Infinite's surprise multiplayer launch has already been a major success for Microsoft, attracting over a quarter of a million players in an evening.
If you were impressed by Forza Horizon 5's incredible feat of attracting 4.5 million players on its launch day, just wait until we see the proper launch of Halo Infinte in December – it's looking likely it'll blow those numbers out of the water.
Within just one hour after its surprise launch, Halo Infinite boasted a wild 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, rising to a massive 272,000+ at its peak during its first day on the servers.
These numbers only focus on Steam players. So that doesn't include anyone logging in and playing through the Xbox app for Windows, or playing via console. It's safe to assume that the Xbox player count dwarfed those Steam numbers, too – anecdotally, my entire friends list was on Halo Infinite last night, and I bet I'm not the only one.
Microsoft has yet to annouce player numbers for Halo Infinite's first big night, but we're expecting the figures will be good. Very good. Given that anyone with a PC or Xbox hardware has access to the free-to-play shooter, it stands to reason the game will attract more players than Forza did last week.
Seeing as Halo Infinite supports multiplayer cross-play and cross-progression between PC and Xbox, we're expecting the massive player pool on console and PC to work in everyone's favour as the game ages and continues to evolve.
If you are jumping into the game, you're probably going to want to play the tutorial first – it comes with some easy achievements and a nice little story, too.
Halo Infinite was initially set to launch alongside the Xbox Series X/S in November 2020, but it was pushed into 2021 after a poor showing in July last year. All we need to do now is wait a few more weeks for the campaign to drop, and the whole experience will finally be in our hands.