Halo Infinite hits over 150,000 players on Steam barely two hours after multiplayer beta launch

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Halo franchise, developer 343 shadow-dropped the Halo Infinite multiplayer beta earlier today, and so far, it seems to be quite a hit with players. Only a few hours after its launch, the game has accrued approximately 165,771 concurrent players on Steam at the time of writing, according to SteamDB.

The data-tracking website shows that Halo Infinite currently has the fourth-highest active player count of any game on Steam. The only games ahead of it are New World, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. While it’s still at least a few hundred-thousand players away from catching Dota or Counter-Strike, it’s lagging behind Amazon’s New World by only about 20,000 players.

SteamDB’s charts also show that more than 228,000 people are concurrently watching gameplay of the beta on Twitch, as does the game’s official Twitch page.

It’s important to note that this player count only includes players on Steam; players on Xbox consoles and the Xbox Game Pass application for PC aren’t included here, meaning that this is merely a portion of Halo Infinite’s total player count. Unfortunately, player counts for Xbox nor its PC application are visible. But given the popularity of Xbox Game Pass, and considering that Halo is inarguably one of Xbox’s top franchises — if not the top franchise on the platform — it’s fair to assume it’s probably racking up high player counts on other platforms too.

The game’s current player count has already surpassed the all-time high Steam player count for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. The Master Chief Collection’s highest concurrent number of players on Steam was 161,024, according to SteamDB. Suffice to say, it looks like a lot of people are excited for Halo, and Halo Infinite appears to be off to a very good start.