Is Competitive Halo Falling Behind Esports Like CS:GO & Call of Duty?

The Halo World Championship is coming soon, April 13-15. Regionals and other qualifiers have been raging since late January, as the official HaloWC Roadmap shows. The weirdest part about it, though, is how little fanfare there is surrounding what should be the premier Halo competition in the world. What does this say about the Halo competitive scene as a whole? Unfortunately, the current outlook is not great.

Take the Sydney Finals that took place in Australia last weekend. Day 1 currently sat just over 1,400 total views on Twitch, while Day 2 had pulled in a meager 746 views. That’s barely 2,000 views combined for a major regional competition in one of the largest first-person shooter franchises on the planet. In contrast, the preview show for this week’s Overwatch League matchups is inching toward 10,000 views (9,725 at time of writing). 

The preview, not even an actual match. Additionally, last weekend's Call of Duty World League Atlanta saw over 17,000 at its peak day, Sunday. Not a single bit of that information looks good if you’re a Halo fan.

The rise of the Battle Royale genre has not helped matter either, with both Fortnite and PlayerUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds pulling in tens of thousands of views with little to no effort. Take this screenshot from Twitch during the creation of this article:

Fortnite and PUBG, numbers two and three on the leaderboard, both with over 50,000 current viewers. If you go further down the list you see DanganRonpa 2, a visual novel, with 2,500 current viewers. So where did Halo sit when this shot was taken? Halo 5: Guardians, the newest game in the franchise, boasted 98 current viewers. Less than 100. If Halo were an old dog, those numbers don’t just show sickness they warrant a serious discussion with the vet about the next move.

While the new genre on the block is pulling some big numbers, it’s not like Halo supporters can say other old games are also falling by the wayside. Go back to that Twitch screengrab above: Rainbow Six: Siege, a game that launched only two months after Halo 5, 4,700 viewers. Grand Theft Auto V, ported to the current console generation after launching in 2013, 5,600 viewers. Even Counter-Strike Global Offensive, a game that’s three years older than the newest Halo game, is pulling 8,300 concurrent live viewers. Those live viewership numbers all at least double the total amount of views on a regional major competition for what some would call the innovator of console shooters. What’s going on here?

This lack of popularity among the masses could eventually translate to a lack of support from the biggest esports teams, and we’ve actually already seen it happening. OpTic Gaming, one of the best and most popular teams in esports,just last week announced the dissolution of their Halo team. This was just two weeks after the 2018 Halo World Championship campaign was announced. If the new league year couldn’t keep OpTic around, what’s supposed to keep other teams going in their stead?

The biggest question now is simple: what can right this ship? Halo is worthy of far more popularity in the esports scene than it currently enjoys, so what can be done to earn those lofty numbers? In this writer’s opinion, it’s as easy as saying the number “six.” The sixth game in the franchise, the end of the second trilogy, would be the shot in the arm this scene needs to climb back to the top. A hypothetical Halo 6 would also need to include a major focus on the competitive side, with a revamped multiplayer and perhaps some new modes that emulate the most popular competitive formats in games today. Heck, Halo Battle Royale mode sounds pretty good, right?

The tenure of the name Halo means that it could easily skyrocket back to competitive prominence, but the community right now is in life support. Should the next game turn out not be the savior of the competitive scene that it should be, or even if that new game is farther out from launch than we expect it to me, then 343 Industries might have to change the numbers in its name to 911, because competitive Halo will be DOA.