It's come to my attention that the number that we see on bungie.net are how many unique players have played the beta in the last 24 hours.

I just checked online and there are only 122,474 players on right now, which is quite disappointing.  I guess not too many people care about Halo anymore.

probably wont break the MW2 record with the beta but im pretty sure when the game comes out it will break MW2s record of most people online because halo is big and this is going to be the last halo game (or all of bungies fans will be mad that the signed with activision and not buy the game causing the game to be a fail but i doubt that is going to happen)

I still think it's a strong number.

I estimate around 3 million unique players by the time the beta ends.

I estimate the Beta can break 1.5 Million in 24h (don't have to be in the first 24h).
The full game should break 2.5 Million in 24h and with this any MW2 record

Not everyone want to play an unfinished game....
If it REACHs 1.5 million, it would be great.

it did seem ridiculous around 1/5 of people who bought odst would be online at the same time. That would have meant like over half of all people who bought the game played the beta at some point on a monday. O well still a bit disappointing.

yo_john, was that number for a single playlist?

Can somebody tell me why there were 1'827'000 players online in Halo 3 and ODST in the last 24 hours and just 1'087'000 in Reach. Looks pretty weird to me. I know everyone who wanna play reach has to put in the ODST Disk. But there is still a difference of 750'000 people!

Btw: 1.8 Million is a huge number ;)

Here is the page for just Halo 3: http://www.bungie.net/Projects/Halo3/default.aspx

I think the number you are looking at is for all 3 games.