Now Halo has set itself as the figurehead of the xbox brand. Its sold millions, gained untold amount of fans, and is loved and enjoyed by many even today. But with the launch of Halo 5, we saw a bit of a "sag". Sales where down significantly at launch, and many worried the population would die quickly due to the the lack of content at launch (thankfully, this has been fixed and now the game has more than enough content). But its been a bit over a year in, so I've decided to come back and analyze how the game has done so far.

Keep in mind lots of this is going to be speculation, so don't take it too seriously

Now lets start with sales:

Currently Halo 5 is the 4th best selling Xbox One game to date: http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/68/xbox-one/

As of November 12, the game has sold 4.37 million units physically, though given the fact it is December 11th today, and the game has averaged around 60-100k sales per month (its the holiday season, so we should see an uptick), I'm going to assume 4.5 million sales. Now this seems pretty bad for a Halo game, considering ODST sold over 6 million copies: http://www.vgchartz.com/game/29077/halo-3-odst/

However, the 360 never saw the effect of digital sales, so we'll need to take that into account as well. Now estimates say that digital sales on consoles make up anywhere from 20-40% of all video game sales today. I'm going to be a bit conservative, and say that 25% of all Halo 5 sales are digital. That would get us to exactly 6 million (1.5 million digital, 4.5 million physical). Now this could be higher or lower depending on how you look at it, but 25% seems to be a decent baseline to go from. So if we assume that Halo 5 has sold 6 million copies to date, that would beat out the sales of Halo CE and Halo: MCC, but also miss the lifetime sales of Halo 3: ODST and Halo 2. Now Halo games are known to sell millions of copies even years into launch, so Halo 5 could potentially top up 7 million, we'll have to see. But so far, my estimates show the game has sold around 6 million copies, which accounts to around a 23% attach rate (if vgchartz estimates of XB1 sales are correct).

Now lets look at the population:

Now back in July, we heard all about the fact that Halo 5 had the higest engagement since Halo 3: 

http://www.inquisitr.com/3287010/halo-5-player-count-increasing-monthly-highest-since-halo-3/

Now I have no idea what they mean by this, so I'm going to have to once again estimate the population. Now I can thank EA for this, as all their games have population counters. Now Battlefield 1 is currently the most played Xbox One game, currently with 117k people online: http://bf1stats.com/

Now the next EA game we can track is SWBF, which is the 25th most played game on the XB1. Currently, its tracking around 22k players on the XB1: http://swbstats.com/

Now of course there are other games in between this, and I know Titanfall 2 (which is 21st) has a population counter, so if anyone has those numbers to share, I'd appreciate it.

Halo 5 is currently at 16th place. So the difference between the 1st and 25th most played games is around 95k. This means as we go down a spot, the population decreases by 3.8k. Of course, these estimates show that the 25th most played game would have 25.8k people (vs 22k right now). So I'm going to have to assume a 15% discrepancy. So with the original calculation, it would show Halo 5 had around 60k active players right now, of course we'll have to make up for that discrepancy, and say there is a 15% decrease on top of that. So that means Halo 5 has 51k active players right now. If we're to do comparisons, Halo 4 was peaking around 20k by the end of its first year at release (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=709697). I also need to mention Halo 4 sold around 40% more than Halo 5, so the trends show Halo 5 is doing far better at maintaining a population, even with so many shooters in the market at this time of year.

This is about how far I'm going to dig into things. If people want to continue to do so, I encourage all forms of discussion (so long has it doesn't get out of hand). I'll also be posting a reply to people who don't want to read a big wall of text.

TL;DR: Halo 5 has sold (according to my estimations) 6 million copies physically and digitally. It also has a population of around 51k as of this writing (concurrent players).

Why did you combined the horrible with dead? meh...
Something can sell much badly but not be dead because the next installment could sell a lot more...

I think it's probably around 6.5 million, I believe VGC has Halo 5 under tracked a good amount.

I heard it ruined Halo. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Sales are good for an exclusive but low compared to previous Halo titles. I wish we could get an official number from MS.

I Remember frank o Conner said it sold not shipped 5 million copies last year. So either digital is higher that's expected or its undertracked.

edit

i double checked he said it did 5 million by the end of January. Vgchartz had it at 3.85 million at the time. So it was either undertacked or digital was very high for it. Considering it's first month NPd I'd say it was digital more than undertracked. Again this is going off of franks comments but seeing as he is franchise director at 343 I'd trust his numbers a lot more than the numbers here.

going off of Franco's comments it probably around 7 million or so. That would be a total of 2 million this year.

There's a Halo 5?? Was it advertised?? Why haven't I heard of it until now?? Surely a new Halo would have made some kind of impact right?? How many times can I ask shit questions?? Why do I always use two question marks?? Will the Nintendo Switch succeed?? Is my name really ktay95?? O_O

Lol