Yeah, this rocks. I want to see how the game is selling overseas, honestly ...

It'll be interesting to see how second week sales hold up, I doubt they'll reach a Million in the US.

But its very possible they can hit 700,000~.

Nice amount of money, but has M$ made more money with Halo 3 than they have poured in to it ? (making of game shouldn't be that much, advertising and everything like that should take their toll from this pile of $$$)

Since MS publishes the game and since Bungie is owned by MS, they take every dime made from Halo 3 (excepting retailer markup and distribution where applicable).

With that kind of revenue coming in after a week, if they haven't made the money back yet, they will very shortly. 

MS has the same development costs as any company so don't forget to add that money. I also wonder how money MS made or lost on this game and how much their worldwide mediablitz had cost. Retail, taxes, shipping takes it toll on every product so if MS really made a dime on this is debatable.

I read somewhere that the entire worldwide media campaign alone has cost them 50-75 million, but can't seem to find the link for that one so quickly. Seems plausible since Halo 3 ads are on all the time in every country on every station.

Yes, MS has the developmental costs. But unlike a second or third party game they publish, they keep ALL the profits. There is no splitting the revenue between publisher and developer. It's all theirs. And they made ~$300m the first week.

Subtract distribution and retail markup, I'll be EXTREMELY generous and subtract $100m (retail markup on games is usually 20% or less and distribution can't even be half that). Add import taxes (which couldn't possibly be higher than 10% overall) and we're down to $170m. Add in manufacturing costs (again, generous at $5/copy overall) and that comes to roughly $20m. So now we're down to $150m. Add in your marketing costs ($75m) and we're down to $75m. Shipping costs are negligible when we're dealing with these kind of numbers but I'll give you $5m.

The actual developmental costs of the game couldn't be $70m. Correct me if I'm wrong but no game has ever breached $50m in development.

Unless I'm forgetting something huge, MS has made money on H3 already using extremely conservative numbers in my estimates.

Halo 3 is an important milestone for Xbox 360 and for videogames as entertainment and as an art form,Since when does the guy know about art ?

Few games exceed thirty million dollars in development costs. Those game that do are usually MMORPGs which as anyone who has played them are extensive affairs. With massive amounts of coding, and artistic assets. Those games have to seem fresh for months even years. Further more they have to be sufficiently complex to keep the player engaged for that long as well. Halo 3 is also not a game that is going to push any technical envelopes. Nor will you find an obscene amount of animation which is increasing the size of many PS3 games justifying things like twenty five million dollar budgets. I would expect that Halo 3 cost Microsoft around twenty million dollars to develop.

Further more your woefully over estimating the marketing budget of the game. While you might think its everywhere. The marketing was very likely directed, and further more much of what you say was cross promotional. Do not use the cost of advertising during the Super Bowl as your metric. Commercial time can be purchased at a very reasonable price. Infomercials are a testament to that. Frugal directed marketing done correctly can produce a lot of volume. I expect at most Microsoft spent twenty million dollars on marketing.

So you might have a total expenditure of fifty million dollars, and frankly I think that is somewhat high. Many analysts have stated the Microsoft could be generating upwards of ninety percent profit on this title. Even if that is before advertising, and you believe the total is upwards of fifty million dollars. Microsoft just turned a eight five percent profit.

Yes Microsoft did very well for itself, and the majority of those sales your seeing are pure profit. Another game on par with this, and Microsoft will wipe out that red ring credit with room to spare. Obviously I expect this game to continue selling for a few more months. Then again it might be selling for years to come as well.

Your numbers seem fair enough, let's continue this game. You did leave retail taxes out of these numbers though and is this 300 million number for games alone or do they include the consoles in the halo packages? Since MS still makes a small loss of 35 or so dollars this affects numbers too. So that would mean 75 dollars (that's what they charge for halo in the us isn't it?) -x% retail taxes(19,5 in the Netherlands wjere I live).

@Dodece, I doubt the red ring loss of a billion dollars will be solved by this game. Even if it generates way more then whatever the outcome of these calculations maybe in the next few days, it's final profit will not be likely to make a significant difference in the financial numbers of MS's games division which has never in it's excistence made a profit since they started the xbox project. Let's not forget that even with the new 65nm cpu chip that's supposed to be in the 360 they are still overheating and making things worse.

@Gazz

"Yes Microsoft did very well for itself, and the majority of those sales your seeing are pure profit. Another game on par with this, and Microsoft will wipe out that red ring credit with room to spare. Obviously I expect this game to continue selling for a few more months. Then again it might be selling for years to come as well."

Notice I said two games Halo 3 and one game on par with it developed by Microsoft. Secondly I have not heard about the Halo 3 edition 360s having heating issues or ring issues. This seems far too early for a problem to appear so in all honesty I really think your making that up.