aquamarine said digital sales is over 25% for AAA. And as much as 35% for games like gears with early play days. Anyway frank o Connor confirmed 5 million copies sold through by the end of January. So whether digital is at 15% or 35% it had 5 million copies sold in January. 

An analysis certainly needs to be done of Halo 5. Sales wise, 343 and MS should be ashamed of themselves.

Having said that, It's not hard to believe digital numbers to be high. It's also very possible that numbers are relatively high, because the drop off for Halo 4 wad astonishingly server and post launch, Halo 5 has had more updates / rotations / changes than Halo 4 ever had.

I'm not defending Halo 5, I hate it, but I think the game has sold far better than VG suggests.

However many replies you ignore that 5 million is still shipped to retailers and not sold to consumers XD

Statistically, it should be a mugh bigger difference between #1 and #10 than between #10 and #20. Your presumption that population decreases by 3.8k per spot down is just downright silly. #1 could have a population of 120k while #2 might have a population of 70k, which is much more likely than #1 having a population of 120k and #2 having a population of 116.3k. I'm gonna say your population estimate is likely waaaaaaaaaaay too high.

Like I said, this is all speculation, and bound to be full of errors. I pretty much so rushed this all out in 10 minutes, so I didn't really take that into consideration.

ShadowSoldier said:
It's pretty telling how Microsoft and Sony both dealt with failing consoles. Sony has always gone out of it's way to secure top talent. When they lost almost all of their exclusive 3rd Party franchises, they made the right move and doubled down on their 1st party studios.

Even going the extra step and encouraging the development of new IPs. It sustained the Playstation brand until they could right the ship with PS3 Slim and PS4.

Then you look at Microsoft and see that their Go-To franchises are seeing dwindling returns in both sales and critical acclaim. They had the opportunity to create a thriving environment for 1st party studios (Giving Bungie more creative freedom and buying Bioware before EA did.) but squandered it. And now they're struggling to fix a broken brand. Between the weak exclusive output, the initial DRM controversy and a weaker console. It really goes to show that fostering a diverse line up of quality games is always the right move for a console manufacturer.

Just gonna post what I posted in another thread

Yeah but just putting it out there that especially for your population estimate. it's probably not even close

Frankie said 5 million sold. He didn't say 5 million shipped.

Yeah Microsoft sold 5 million copies to retailers but it doesn't mean 5 million copies were bought by consumers.

When they say "sold" it almost always means shipped unless they specifically mention that it's sold-through. We've seen this so many times by now and it's always the same.

If Halo 5 seriously has a 24/h peak of 51,000 players this long into its lifespan, I'd call that a resounding success. Wasn't the dropoff with Halo 4 quite severe?