If I were you, I'd expect nothing nice to come from Aaron Greenburger...

I'd like to hear digital sales for their 1st party games.

Ya I saw that on amazon as well. You think 2million including digital and pc is the high end? I think as long as it gets decent marketing in the next couple weeks and reviews strong(which I'm confident that it will score between 80-90 as they picked a great developer) that it will hit those numbers. I think it could do a million on pc alone.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5_gS_IMB0
1st mission and cutscenes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=necdqFG2mLs
Intro cutscene to 2nd mission.
For Halo wars 2 by the way. My spoiler free impressions below.

Positives

• 14 minutes(or more because there could be more at end of the second mission) of blur created cgi cutscenes for the 2 first missions alone. Jeeze it could have 1 1/2 hrs of cgi for the whole game. That's gotta be expensive.

• art direction looks very similar to h2a(the best in the series)

• fight scenes!

• story and tone are top notch. Watch and see

• characters Seam strong as well with the highlight being atriox. They are really setting him up to be the best villain in the series it seams. Far better than the didact, jul what's his name, and the warden to be sure.

• voice acting and other sounds are top notch

• in game graphics and very good

• earn experience towards  you character from single player missions
Negatives
• the in engine cutscenes are not very good at all. Possibly old build but from what I can tell this is the finished game.

All in all that was amazing. More than I could have hoped for. My love for halo has existed since I was 11 at my brother in laws house playing halo 2. And it continues to this day. However 343's abysmal direction with halo 5's story(after the great one we got with 4?) made my passion for halo campaigns sizzle up and die of sorts. But watching this has started the flame again. This could potentially get taken down so watch it quick if interested.

- I feel like those cinamatics are so good it deserves a thread of its own.

Yes you might be right about needed steam, I hope Microsoft comes to their senses about it. They could probably make windows 10 a requirement on steam. And perhaps ms and steam could get together and have the game launch on steam but also require a sign in to Xbox live so that Microsoft store users and steam users could play together and even friend each other. It would make sense for them to do it at least for Microsofts side for more than just halo wars2. Scorpio could possibly get steam since it seams ms is blending consoles with desktops. And playing steam games on Scorpio would be a game changer.

  In any case halo wars 2 needs all the sales it can get. Blur is one of if not the best in the industry at what they do. And I'm sure they are very expensive. Between blur, CA, and 343 working on this game I suspect 2 million sales might be at or even below the break even mark.

edit- looking at the total war. There most recent total war game sold 1/2 a million copies in its first couple days of release. I know it a franchise with a following(sega says the sieries has done 20 million units in the last 16 years). But clearly there is a big market for rts's and particularly creative assemblies ones. There are 6 total war games that have more than 1k daily players on steam. I'm sure some fans of that series will give hw2 a try. And if it's good I'm sure they will pull in more of their total war/other rts buddies on whether or not it's on steam.

Do you know Microsoft's expectations for Quantum Break? I'm not trying to defend his as I don't trust him as well as you but as great as Remedy games are, they don't sell for some reason, just like Platinum games. As an investor, my expectations for a Remedy game with new concept wouldn't be more than 0.75-1.0 million, or I'm setting myself for a failure.

I was 100% sure I was going to grab Halo Wars 2 digital so I could play it on PC as RTS is one of the few genres that really benefit from keyboard+mouse input but ShopTo have the physical Xbox One copy for £33 which has made me unsure which to grab now :D

The other alternate is the PC copy here that costs £55 that basically is the "Ultimate Edition" that costs £65 on the store as it is a digital key with a disc to install if you want that includes season pass + Halo Wars 1 which is decent value as it's play anywhere and allows you to play on the Xbox One as well.

Edit: It's actually cheaper to buy the Ultimate physical PC copy even if you don't own a PC and use the digital code on your Xbox One as it's £10 cheaper lol.

When did he say it sold well. I suspect it could have had an ok launch and that is when he said it. Since then the game probably has had very poor legs and thus the bad sales.

Played a plethora of games today (mostly "old" ones I already played at one point). Some things I noticed:

Far Cry 4 (Valley of the Yetis DLC)
Wow, after playing Far Cry Primal I just now noticed how inferior this game is on a technical level. Primal runs far smoother, looks much cleaner and has less pop in. Considering the Dunia engine was already used in Far Cry 2, it does a very impressive job in Primal.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Only played it for an hour and a half back in November, so I had a pretty hard time getting into it again (learning the controls and all). I already liked it back then but I think I appreciate it even more right now. Fantastic game so far. Graphics seem a bit inconsistent though (on a very high level obviously), not sure if I would put it above DA:Inquisition.

Call of Duty Black Ops 3
Played the 3rd mission and it was pretty crappy. Who thought it was a good idea to constantly have wind and water obstacles where you need to anchor yourself to the ground? Pretty annoying.

I almost done with quantum break and love the game, hope Microsoft gives the game a sequel.