I was reading something the other day and they said there have been over 1billion hours of gameplay online for Halo.

   Hey, I like it personally.  When sitting down to play a game, I can see that my friend is sitting on his butt playing games at the moment too, and then we can hook up on a game.  Or if I see they are playing a game I can just join in, I will.

Well so much for my Halo 3/XBox 360 estimates then.

Dag!

John Lucas 

Why don't they just release the game as soon as possible? Why hold it back for a stupid, later date? Sheesh. No one is going to complain if they release the game early. It's better!

Let's think about that...

1,000,000,000 hours ~  41,666,667 days ~ 114,115 years

Assuming the average person lives for 80 years (a very high estimate), Halo has effectively killed approximately 1,427 people.

That is the most awesome Halo statistic ever. 

The reason they don't break streetdates on games, or just release ASAP:

Supply.

There aren't enough copies of the game to go around. Think about it: How many H3 copies can be made this quick? There is demand *probably* around 5m copies pretty quick worldwide. The copies need to be made in country X, and shipped to country Y, which takes time (the same thing can be said for consoles).

Not only this, MS is trying to release Halo3, like other games, in every major country at the same time. This takes extra time, so they are trying to make sure they are fair with distribution, and not gimp a certain region of what they want *cough* Xbox 360 launch in the US *cough*.

well... it seems us lot in the UK have got a game that everyone wants earlier then every1 else for once =)