It's just like anything that gets over popular. The bigger the fanbase gets, the more people that dislike the game are going to come out of the wood works and voice their opinion on it. Although Halo wasn't the first of it's kind in the particular genre, it hit the gaming audience with full force.
The video games, mostly Halo: Combat Evolved, have been praised as being the best, and most influential, first person shooters on a console, with Halo being the Xbox's "Killer App". It even led to the term "Halo Killer" being used to describe console games that aspire to be better then Halo. Then, Halo 2 broke sales recordsfor a media release, and then Halo 3 sold more than $170 million worth of copies in its first 24 hours of release, topping the records of Halo 2. As of this month, the Halo games combines have sold more than 20 million copies. So, I guess there is a pretty big fan base that is backing them.
As for myself, from what I've collected in just watching the game as it grew was the fact that the multiplayer maps were just awesome, you could never deny a single map on them saying that, it isn't all that fun for a competitive match between friends or it was lacking a certain something. That, and the fact that anyone could pick up the controls to the game in a few minutes and have fun with it for hours. I believe those are 2 big reasons that the fan base of this series has grown so much, because anyone can enjoy it, even if they aren't a gamer. So Bungie basically hit the best of both worlds. They were able to dummy it down so that anyone could pick up the controller and learn how to play in mere minutes and through all of that, they were still able to have enough skill level required in the same aspects to challenge hardcore gamers that strive to be the best. When a game is able to do both of those and still bring out a game that is really interesting, the sky is the limit from there and that's exactly where Bungie wanted to go with it all.
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