Halo Wars 2 seems to have entered and quickly exited the public consciousness, but it seems the consolized RTS’s player counts aren’t too shabby, even a year after release. The game sees around 30,000 unique players weekly, which is a much healthier level of interest than you might expect.
API data reveals those player counts, with the most recent info – the week of June 18 – showing a player count of 31,982. That data’s fairly consistent coming back a full year, and it only counts gamertags that have been in multiplayer matches. Spread across game modes, 60,000 to 80,000 matches are played every week though naturally some modes are better populated than others.
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Unless they’re playing 24/7, 30,000 weekly players won’t add up to a whole lot of concurrents, which is how we’re used to tracking PC players thanks to services like Steam Charts. Still, it’s clearly a healthy enough community to persist consistently for well over a year. And they’re enjoying it enough to be evangelizing the game to others – like in this ResetEra thread that brought the data to our attention.
We don’t have data for how those counts break down on console versus PC, though it doesn’t really matter with the game’s added cross-play support. For reference,Sea of Thieves player counts showed 283,000 players on PC during launch month, compared against 1.7 million on Xbox One. You can probably expect similar percentages with Halo Wars 2, though RTS is a genre more closely associated with PC.
Like Sea of Thieves, Halo Wars 2 is a Game Pass title, though it was one added well after launch – which means it’s a useful test case for the popularity of Microsoft’s subscription service. Player counts jumped by about 5,000 the week after it hit Game Pass, which gives you an idea of the boost older franchise titles might get from the service.