Week end 27th December 2008 Halo 3 will be sitting at 8.9 million copies sold. 9 million will happen sometime in January. This is a milestone in itself but only 8 Playstation games have sold more than Halo 3.

Pretty good when you think both previous Playstation consoles have 100+million userbase, when Halo 3 nears the end of its sales it should be around 12+ easily. Meaning only THREE playstation games over the last 14 years will have higher sales than Halo 3.

Grand Theft Auto Vice City + San Andreas + GT3.

Halo 3 reaching 10 million by 1/1/2010

I tracked Halo 3 sales pretty closely in 08 and it only fell below 20k 8/52 weeks ... in fact most weeks it was above 25k.

With the higher sales the 360 will receive in Q1/2/3 I don't expect Halo 3 to fall short of 20k a week. Certainly NEVER below 10k.

So ignoring the last 8 weeks of the year.

44 x 25k = 1.1 million

44 x 20k = 880k

44 x 15k = 660k

If it averages 25k for the first 10 months of the year it will hit 10 million. However I doubt it will so I will factor in holiday sales.

Gears of War ONE sold around 95k last week, this is a 2 year old game. It did well this christmas because? well either A: because it had a sequal out or B: Its a great game.

Both apply to Halo 3 later this year (in a sense) ODST will raise awareness of Halo 3, in fact you need Halo 3 to play ODST so I expect a bigger boost for Halo 3 than Gears 1. Microsoft will be hyping this and would it be surprising to see Halo 3 do 300K christmas week when everybody buying ODST needs to buy Halo 3 with it?

Even if ODST has zero impact Halo 3 will still sell on average around 600k+ (thats what it has sold in the last 9 weeks)

Wow ... I'm even thinking about changing it to 10.5 million by 2010.

I think between 11 and 12 million. Halo 3 will be one of those games that should continue to sell decently throughout the 360's life, being one of the flagship titles. Similar to how Nintendo games sell strongly throughout the systems life (just not as much).

nice analysis, but this is wrong

Are you sure?! I though ODST was an expansion?

Edit - Yeah seems you're right, you don't need Halo 3 for this ...

There is a thread on this already from snake612 but il stick with my original prediction of 11 million

Considering that the game is awesome, cheap and the series will have a massive advertising campaign I can see it doing amazing numbers towards the end of this year. 11M isn't too far fetched so I will peg my prediction there.

Prediction Halo 3 = or > 11M units sold to consumers by first week of 2010.

It will be interesting to watch wether the upcoming expansion pack boosts the sales of this one.

The expansion will be standalone...but it could boost the original. Really, M$ needs to launch Halo 3 as the standard bundled game of the 360, since this acts like a price cut.

They can't bundle Halo 3 across he board because it is rated M.  Should be rated Teen in my opinion, but I am not the ESRB.  If they took out the sparse amounts of human blood and a couple words, it'd likely be a Teen-rated game.

When Halo 3 is reduced in price and becomes a classic XBox 360 title retailing for $29.99, sales of the game should take off. Halo 3 is being bundled with XBox 360 Elite console purchasers by retailers. VGC sales estimate of 8.9 million could be a tad low and I would say Halo 3 could of even reached 10 million sales ltd already.
Software sales are much harder to track than hardware sales.

Halo 3 could well finish over 12 million sales by the end of the console generation.

The game appeals to a wide audience young and old gamers love the game. It may not have the best graphics but it is an awesome online shooter experience where XBL numbers today are still around 1 million online at any given time.