After everything we've seen, I'll put forth my newest prediction for H3: 10,500,000 copies sold at the end of its lifespan. Why? #1 - Price drop & GTAIV. Between having huge supporting titles like Mass Effect, GTAIV, and LO, the user base should grow pretty quickly just before H3 comes out. Its not that the user base will be beyond H2's base, but it will quickly overcome it. When H2 came out, the user base was (I estimate) 15m w/w. It's at 9.7m now, and should reach 11m or more once it comes out. #2 - Live Anywhere & online stuff. Halo 2 still sells 8k units nearly 2 years after it's launch. Not major, but with such a huge online community, there should be enough sales after launch to sustain decent sales afterwards. #3 - Holiday lineup. Not to be mean, but GTAIV and H3 ARE christmas. For us americans, what better 1-2 knockout could there be to buy this christmas? Halo3 has the advange of being a very strong title at the end of year, as well as well into a few months into 2008. #4 - Outside userbase. The European and Japanese base is growing (albiet slowly). We should see a bit more sales from "others". Somewhere near 3.5m should be feasable.

Are you serious?

dont think it'll get 15m but for me there's so many 360 games i've wanted to play but we got the wifes Wii and Ds first. Enoughs enough for me - this is the actual 360 system seller for me and i'm gonna have one for this. Halo 1 was a fantastic game and really got me into console fps for about a year whe I played evey xb fps and couldn't get enough of them, this may just kick start it off again for me.

Halo 2 - got bored half way through and didn't even finish it

 If pre-order sales were that high Microsoft would have made an officially announcement. Infact once it passed the million marker Microsoft would have made an announcement. So take into consideration that no other sites made any similiar announcements. I bet you anything it was just some journalist trying to get his site publicity!

I never preorder my games but I think 4 millions is realistic as there is 8 million Halo 2 games sold for 25 millions consoles sold, which is 1/3 ratio. So if Halo 3 were to be released right now it could sell 3.5 million easily. But there's a lot of ppl like me that bought or are going to buy a 360 for Halo 3. I think Halo 3 would sell 5 millions copies on release, but that's just a guess.

Gamespot is reporting that this is bogus news: http://www.gamespot.com/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=25623668&sid=6170547&action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;4

I am not underestimating Halo, but I do think you are underestimating Mario.

Halo - 6.43M
Halo 2 - 7.89M

Mario 64 - 11.89M
Mario Sunshine - 5.9M
New SMB - 9.56

vgchartz

Sunshine didn't do as well, but who's beating who's ass?  Halo is synonymous with Xbox, Mario is synonymous with videogames.

Well SMB is on a diffrent platform, not that many good games for DS (I own one and the only other good fun game is mario kart, maybe supermario 64 DS) so its very realistic that is should sell 10 million. Sunshine had about the same userbase as halo did but halo outsold it. Beleive me, Microsoft will not let anyone not know the relise date for halo 3, they will have hundreds of t.v. commmericals billboards signs anything you can think of. The hype will be simply enourmous and it will sell incredibly

Mario 64 was bundled so we can't compare

THE really big seller was SMB3 with 17M, that's the ultimate goal for a game that is not a Pokémon of course. GTAs sold up to 15M, so 15M is reallistic but only on a console sold at 40+ millions.

The next Mario will sell more than Sunshine but less than Mario 64.