We definitely aren't the biggest market lol.
We are but a few hundred "regular" players on WA, and i'd guess less than 50% of us obtained this game legally.
When T17 sell new games, thousands of people buy these games, probably play it for a few hours, and never play it again.
Sounds like T17 has contracted "343 Syndrome".
Y'see, 343 Industries (a division of Microsoft and caretaker of the Halo franchise) released this game last November called The Master Chief Collection. It was meant to bring the first four Halo games together into one interface plus upgrades like 1080p/60 FPS.
The release was a disaster. The online barely worked at launch, it had crashes, saving bugs, UI bugs, and the ports of the games themselves were half-assed too, using old builds, inferior builds, messed up controls, etc.
Here's the kicker. The day of release, after several months of hyping the game up, the top brass vanished from social media. What followed were half-assed apologies claiming the problems caught them off guard, when the game was SO broken that a non-gamer playing for 5 minutes could easily tell that something wasn't right.
Then crap got piled on crap. Patches were released. They did little, with the changelogs using the word "improved" way more often than "fixed". Some even undid prior fixes. Then, compensation was announced - some in-game badges, a free month of Xbox Live (the subscription service for online play), and a port of half of a spin-off game (Halo 3: ODST without the multiplayer). Better than nothing, but these items were only given to people who played the game within the FIRST FIVE WEEKS of release, when the game was
still partially broken SIX MONTHS on!Then, just recently, with the game mostly working but certainly not polished, the head of the company came out of hiding...and gave more excuses. And with Halo 5 on the way, patches, and even MENTIONS of The Master Chief Collection are drying up real fast.
And guess what? Their plan is working. The reviewers mostly ignored the bugs at launch, assuming they'd get fixed, then never did a second look at it - all of this information has been gathered by unofficial Halo fan sites. The online population has dropped like a stone, and people are buying into the Halo 5 hype, which looks like flashy, throwaway Call Of Duty-style gameplay.
The cycle goes on.