Halo 3 sales reach $300 million in first week

"Microsoft has revealed that global sales of Halo 3 have reached over USD 300 million in its first week of release.

And the company claims that according to retail sources, sales of Xbox 360 hardware have more than doubled compared with the weekly average.

"Halo is truly a cultural phenomenon, and the launch of Halo 3 is an important milestone for Xbox 360 and for videogames as entertainment and as an art form," commented Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft.

"Halo 3 embodies our vision for the future of entertainment, where some of the world's greatest creative minds will deliver a new generation of interactive storytelling," he said.

Microsoft stats reveal that more than 2.7 million people have played Halo 3 over Xbox Live in the past week, with the first day of release seeing a total of 3.6 million hours of online play, increasing to 40 million hours by the end of the first week."

Source - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=29270

2.7 unique users on Halo 3 that connected to Xbox Live.

Microsoft stated in a previous press release that 40% of consoles are not connected to Live even through a Silver account.

2.7m = 60% of Halo 3 owners.

4.5m = 100% of Halo 3 owners? Nah, probably not, but there could possible be between 3.5-4 million sales in the first week. Very impressive.

Nice sales ... but I wonder how long will it last :?

...Until people stop buying it? Hehe.

At $73 a unit (the average price from various sources), that'd put Halo 3 at 4.13m units for its first not-quite-7-day week.


Very, very impressive numbers. It'll be massively frontloaded (expect no more than 1m units sold next week), but should wind up with good legs. Everyone that has a X360 that wants Halo 3 will probably have it by Christmas, but that could be alot of people. Add in the new X360 owners (probably 3-4m of them from now till end of December), and we should see Halo 3 sales get close to 7 million units by EOY w/w.

Oddly enough, the place it seems that Halo 3 is actually sold out are non-US regions. It's sold out in Japan, and reports I've seen say it's sold out in the UK as well.

My 14.5m unit prediction seems to be off to a strong start :)

This is why MS doesn't need to follow SONY and counter their new 40 GIG PS3. Games lead to sales and they have plenty this holiday and well into 2008. Exclusive games like katamari, ace combat, and even nataru will bring a wider audience to the 360. I can't wait to see how well MASS EFFECT does though it won't pull Halo 3 numbers it should be higher then bioshock and maybe even gears of war. I think we seen the last of MS being in the red with the xbox business. 3-5 years from now they will come out with a new system but next time around they will follow nintendos' footstep and make money from day 1.

I agree that MS has a great chance of being profitable for the rest of the generation (barring more RRoD problems) but I don't think they'll take Nintendo's approach to hardware next time around. While Nintendo is profiting nicely on hardware right now (and assuredly will next gen as well), MS is in a different market. They're going for the "living room centerpiece" experience and that requires nicer hardware.

But they definitely won't hemmorrage money like they did with the 360. I expect to see modest hardware losses right out of the gate with a quick turn into profitability. The same goes for Sony.

The most interesting thing will be the next xbox and what format they will use, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray or something else. Since games are already pushing past the limits of DVD9.

Don't forget that a certain percentage of the people online had a pirated copy of the game, so 2.7 million doesn't represent the actual number of paying customers. I did some digging into that some time ago for a similar topic on Gamershell forums and just general torrentsites alone had 100.000+ downlaods and that's not counting private sites, newsgroups, limewire and all that stuff.

I think it's reasonably  fair to assume that somewhere between 10-20% of all those users had a warez copy so these numbers are not completely reliable.

Given the apparent inexpensive nature of HD-VMD, I am surprised MS didn't opt for that. Isn't an HD-VMD drive as inexpensive as a DVD drive? I know it still uses red laser technology.

Very impressive. Im sure halo 3 will have good run all the way to christmas.