Bungie Watch! End of an Era Edition
A few months ago, we reported that Bungie Studios, the developer behind the Halo series, would be making a major change to their online community in the near future. As part of a larger shift away from Halo, and towards their next big thing, Bungie would be ending data collection for all of their Halo games. Sadly, that change took effect yesterday. Read on for the details, and some staggering final statistics from nearly a decade of Halo data collection.
As of March 31, 2012, Bungie ceased collecting data from all Halo titles. Your online stats and service record on Bungie.net will remain, but will no longer update. It will stand, as Bungie aptly put it, as a monument to all our sins. Additionally, any custom content created in-game will no longer be available to download from the web. That means that all screenshots, films, maps, and gametypes will no longer be able to be shared from Bungie’s servers. While player statistics from Halo Reach will continue to be collected and displayed on Halo Waypoint, there is currently no file sharing functionality on that site. 343 Inudustries has stated that file sharing will be coming to Waypoint in the summer, but there has no firm date given for when those services will become available. Want one more little nugget of sadness? Currently, Waypoint is only configured to display game data collected from Halo: Reach. While data from Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST will still be collected, plans to have them accessible from the website are on hold while the Waypoint team concentrates on Reach and Halo 4.
But since Bungie loves us, they didn’t let this sad day pass without giving us all something to be happy about. As a final sendoff to their Halo years, they’ve done some number crunching, and have come up with some astonishing statistics. Since Bungie.net stat collecting began with Halo 2 on September 9th, 2004, there have been over 20 billion games played through matchmaking. That’s billion with a B. There have been over 136 billion kills, which is more than the total number of humans who have ever lived on the planet. Bungie.net members have uploaded 150 million files, which is more than the total number of items stored in the Library of Congress. Most stunning of all, players have spent a combined 235,182 years playing Halo, which is more time than it would take to journey across the entire length of the Milky Way galaxy at the speed of light… and back. There are many, many more statistics to browse through, and in typical Bungie fashion, they’ve loaded all of them into a single, elegant page, loaded with easter eggs, and overflowing with affection for the fanbase that made them what they are today.
So while its true that the final chord between Bungie and Halo has been cut, the future still looks bright for both entities. Halo will continue to prosper with 343 Industries, and Bungie will continue to work on… well, whatever it is they’re working on. And if you’re looking for an even bigger version of that data image, click here.