Halo has returned to PC. The long-awaited launch of Halo: Reach is here, and players on Steam are more than ready for it. Even if Reach might not have quite the same nostalgic reach as its predecessors, it managed to pull in over 100,000 concurrent players just one hour after launch, and it’s burning up all the relevant metrics. The future looks bright for Halo PC.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection has peaked at 139,444 concurrent players on Steam as of this story, which makes it number four on the platform – well behind the peaks of the big three of CSGO, Dota 2, and PUBG, but well ahead of perennial favourites like Rainbow Six Siege, GTA5, and Destiny 2.
That’s doubly impressive since it’s not even the full player count. Reach is also available via Xbox Game Pass on PC, and while we don’t have player counts for that platform, Microsoft’s heavy promotion of the service likely means there are quite a few players there. There’s full cross-play between the PC versions – though not with console – so all those players are in a single pool regardless.
The full Master Chief Collection and Reach by itself are currently the number one and two sellers on Steam, and the MCC is currently the top game on Twitch, buoyed by broadcasts from popular streamers like DrDisrespect, xQc, tyler1, and summit.
Beta testing for Halo CE PC is set to begin early next year, so hopefully we’ll see the remainder of the collection hit PC a bit more quickly than Reach did.