People lost their shit over old halo games and reach. Halo's fine. Halo 5 sold like 5 mill in 3 months, definitely not the greatest in terms of halo but it's nowhere near bad 🤷🏾♂️. A bad console launch an shitty campaign definitely didn't help. That's why 4 did so well (even though the MP was dead after a year) compared to 5, 360 was batter success at the time.
An halo infinite's been in trending for the last few days. Even the halo community isn't going crazy over ANOTHER engine trailer. Can only get hyped for that so much, at this point most of the community's just like "Ok that's cool and all but let us know when we have gameplay." The book, merchandise, all halo memorabilia is stills selling like hot cakes like it always does, halos about to get a big budget tv series, MCC is coming to PC and is super hyped in that regard. If anything I'd say halos is NOW popular again.
Before it the community was essentially dead, no games some comic books here and there but nothing big to have anyone talking. But to ignore how massive MCC is for PC is ignorant, just shows you that the brand still has a lot of power if you can get modern day PC players hyped for decade (seen someone right this fact off because they were bungie games like halo 4 isn't in that collection and halo 2 anniversary basically being a new game) old games. I'd say halo's in the best position possible to make a comeback, but overall, yeah it did lose a lot of its popularity over the years. Sure as hell ain't close to being dead but the last halo game came out like 5 years ago, what were you expecting?? Plus sea of thieves has EIGHT MILLION PLAYERS. Gamepass is a guaranteed success now, imagine with infinite being on steam, pc gamepass, Xbox gamepass, xcloud and all that will do for halo's popularity.