That's a pretty poor analysis of online stats to come to the conclusion that VGC sales numbers are MASSIVELY undertracked. In order to put "4x Halo 3 launch week online activity" and "65% higher than Halo 3's best concurrent online activity" into proper context you need to first know the Halo 3 numbers. Without knowing the Halo 3 numbers you can't conclude anything about possible Reach launch week sales.

Remember also that VGC is an estimate and a tolerance of 10% up or down on the actual reported number is perfectly acceptable. So an opening week of 4.4 million has a reasonable probability of being the true launch sales and it would be churlish of anyone to suggest that VGC did a poor job of estimating sales were that the case.

Number of unique users online for any period of time is a very poor indicator of game sales.

Umm, they compare that because its a response to the recent controversy where Major Nelson charts had Halo 3 ranked above Reach somehow. Prompting a lot of people to erroneously declare Reach a bomba.

And also because obviously, Bungie doesn't have access to MW2's numbers.

It's interesting though, because some of Bungie's stats do point to much greater Reach sales than 3.

So I might have been right all along, Reach might shatter all records and sell as much as 5 million first month in the USA.

You do realize you can go on Bungie.net at any time and see current user count for Reach?

Perhaps you should do some basic research before telling others to STFU.

Total unique users, its not that hard to figure out what I was trying to say.

I am not trying to claim bias, but I feel like ioi has been poo pooing Reach sales right from the start. He seems very negative toward the game under the surface. He once flatly claimed it will sell "like a more frontloaded MW2" as if there was no possibility it could do better than that. which I believe based on historical attach rates, it can do much better than any MW title has done on 360. If you look at it, Halo (not counting lame stuff like ODST) has historically had much higher userbase attach rates than COD on 360. In that Halo 3 sold to  ~  50% of 360 owners first month, a figure no title has ever come close to. Of couse I dont expect Reach to attach to 50% of 360 owners first month this time that would be absurd, but the point is a high attach rate much larger userbase could=huge sales.

I could be very wrong but I yet believe we may see a huge 4.2-5.0 first month NPD for Reach.

really? =/....

oh well...WAY off? LOL.

to the guys saying that MW2 has been played more than H:R, that's not true, MW2 it's number one in the list because it had a full week track, while H:R has 2-3 days only...with a full week, it's  a fact that we'll see H:R @1...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Bungie's response aimed at Major Nelson's earlier report on Live activity, and NOT sales?

A possible explanation is that simply more people were connected to Xbox Live. I got both Halo 3 and Reach on the day of release but I didnt not have Xbox Live until a few weeks after Halo 3s launch. Additionally, me and my brother have separate Live accounts, but one copy of Reach.

Although the numbers of people in those situations wont be massive, there will be a fair few which will add up. The number of unique users does not equal number of copies sold.

If I play with a friend on my xbox 360 does that count as two unique users?  And yeah people are spending a lot of time online thx to Daily weekly challenges... Halo 3 looks now kind of boring without those challenges and I am sure their are people here who are addicted to it like me;

You do realize that is exactly what he means, don't you?   He's saying Reach will have a larger percentage of buyers pick up the game in the first month of sale than MW2.  You just agreed with what he said.