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SvennoJ on 04 November 2015
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enrageorange said:
riecsou said:
Halo 3 hours and "number of players"
More than 2.7 million gamers have played “Halo 3” on Xbox LIVE in the first week, representing nearly one-third of the 7 million Xbox LIVE members worldwide. Within the first day of its launch, “Halo 3” players worldwide racked up more than 3.6 million hours of online gameplay, which increased more than elevenfold to 40 million hours by the end of the first week,

Halo 4 hours and "number of players"
Halo 4” also shattered the record for the largest number of players in the history of the “Halo” franchise, with over 4 million players in the first five days. Users spent a total of 31.4 million hours playing “Halo 4,”

Halo 5 hours and "number of players"
Fans have logged more than 21 million hours of total gameplay, including 12 million hours in campaign mode alone.
For Halo 5 we get the hours but no "number of players". And if we compare those hours...

Halo 3 sold 3.8mil week 1 and had 40million hours of play. = 10:30 hours of playtime per sale
Halo 4 sold 3.65 week 1 and had  31.4 million hours of play = 8:40 hours of playtime per sale

Here are Halo 5's sales assuming it had Halo 3 like playtime, Halo 4 like playtime, and playtime continued to decline.

Halo 5 has 21 million hours of playtime at 10:30 hours per sale => 2mil sales week 1.
Halo 5 has 21 million hours of playtime at 8:40 hours per sale=>2.4mil sales week 1.
Halo 5 has 21 million hours of playtime at 7:40 hours per sale => 2.8mil sales week 1.

Halo 5 probably had between 2 and 2.8million sales. I would say those sales are pretty mediocre but the decline is less than 50% from Halo 4.
Compared to Call of Duty which declined from 3.6mil (Ghosts 360) to 1.7mil (Advance Warfare XB1), much bigger decline.

People who expected Halo 3 like numbers were expecting too much. Halo: Reach and Halo 4 only managed their sales due to the massive install bases. Halo 3 sold so well on a tiny install base because it was the most played multiplayer game till MW2 came out. Nowadays battlefield, call of duty, destiny, halo, and heck even GTA are all fighting for the multiplayer fps userbase on the xbox one.

That makes sense. The game play time decline wasn't really there though. Halo 4 stats were for 5 days, so 1:30 hours per day per sale for Halo 3, vs 1:40 hours per day per sale for Halo 4.  Of course there are other factors. More people play online today, no more offline co-op and the fan base has grown older and probably has less time to spend with the game on a daily basis. So a higher percentage of copies get played online with likely less hours per copy. Hard to tell.

Yet that older fan base also has more disposable income to spend on the game. Revenue is what matter in the end for MS, although more unit sales are also good to keep a franchise healthy.

Btw, more people played Halo 4 online the first 5 days than it sold copies in the first week? Are those Halo 4 sales numbers accurate?