Lol they did. They said it sold better than minecraft(1 million). 1 million is 40% if the game did 1.5 million physical. 

I can vouch for this, specially since Halo seems to have a very high, even by console standards, attach rate. The people saying MS would be screaming it at the top of their lungs have to provide precedent of that happening...

Not to mention, at 700,000 units alone, you have $42M in earnings. That's pretty low. At 1.5 million, that'd be more than enough to cover dev costs...

As for digital estimates, it's not unbelievable for it to sell 1M. If it really is the digital XONE best seller, we only need the highest digital numbers for the Xbox One, Minecraft's total sales, Minecraft's X360 physical sales and Minecraft's Xbox One physical sales and we can obtain a ballpark number for Halo 5 digital sales through an elimination process alone...

http://majornelson.com/2012/05/10/minecraft-xbox-360-edition-breaks-digital-sales-records/

but some conspirancy theories claim the following:
xbox 360 marketplace =/ xbox store

It's not a conspiracy it is a possible situation.

The fact that they chose that wording instead of something like "best-selling digital game ever on an xbox platform for an opening week" or "best-selling digital game ever in an opening week" can indeed lead people to see spin, regardless of the intent.

sure. everything is possible. just like a 90% digital attachrate
they said xbox store. not xbox one store. was probably obvious enough for them. who would have thought about all the interpretation in some forums.
microsoft didn't even notice an xbox one could be named xbone by the internet.

it's up for everyone to believe on or the other.

Sure everything is possible.  However, when you have companies who rely on their image to the consumer/investors and thus word things deliberately in ways to get that image to shine, you can start to read between lines.  When a company stops giving specific numbers, you can read between the lines and see they aren't meeting the expectations they expected.  When a company words things in a specific way, you can tell they are trying to make something sound good.

Hell, during last night's football game in an attempt to make the Broncos QB look like something special they gave us a ridiculous stat about him being the only QB in history to make his first start on his birthday and win.  Useless information designed to inflate the player.  Same thing in all forms of business.

End of the day, if Halo had a 90% digital purchase, MS would've said it was the highest digital sales item in history.  If it surpassed what Destiny did for percentage, they would've mentioned that too (and they might have, I haven't paid that much attention to it).  By weeding out some of the records and such they DIDN'T mention, you can start to infer what they actually mean.

that 90% was just a "good" example of everything is possible.
im well aware of the wording and pr talk and know how to read it.
right now i can't tell you what's right, or wrong. both is totally possible

some companies stopped to give actual numbers no matter how good they are. (fifa as example)
it's the second biggest anual ip right now and growing. ea does not give numbers...


i hope we will get an unit sales milestone form ms at the end of the year, or early in 2016.
in that case, we can try to explorate digital sales. if the physical numbers from NPD and gfk + estimates for the rest of world have a big discrepancy to the overall number, we have a "proof" halo 5 sold exeptionall well digitally

My guess is that they are just including games that are in the main marketplace, while excluding ones launched specifically on Arcade, where Minecraft landed.  Or they could be doing what the "conspiracy" suggests, only including games that launched after the change from Xbox Live Marketplace to Xbox Games Store.  With all the maneuvering they did in that PR statement, it wouldn't surprise me if either were true.

I agree with the bolded portion.  I just can't see them segregating it all any further than that in an effort for PR.

What industry sources?