Halo 4 makes big bank but probably won’t outdo this season’s other big shooter.
You may want to sit down for this. It turns out that Halo is really popular and a lot of people bought the latest installment. How many people? We’re not sure, Microsoft hasn’t released exact sales figures, but it has released a ludicrously large number with a dollar symbol in front that I’m told represents how much the game made in its first 24 hours on sale: $220 million. That’s roughly 9.16 million dollars an hour or 2436.29 dollars a second. There’s a nice figure to contemplate while you fish today’s supper out of a nearby garbage can.
Fortunately for us, Microsoft has taken a break from building castles out of stacked dollar bills to do some good old fashioned statistical bragging. Halo 4 has become the most played installment in the series, with over 4 million players spending some 31.4 million hours on the game in the last five days. This brings the total time humanity has spent playing Halo games to around 4 billion hours or 456318 years. That’s about the same amount of time our species spends watching YouTube videos each month. Total lifetime earnings for the series now stand at $3.38 billion.
Of course, while success is nice, crushing your enemies beneath your money-booted heel is even nicer, and that’s where Halo may stumble. Call of Duty: Black Ops II launches tomorrow (November 13th) and based on the performance of previous installments in the series, it’ll likely out-perform Halo 4 by a solid margin – though the fact these games are competing at all kind of proves that publishers are still iffy on how the whole “release date” thing works. In its first 24-hours, Black Ops numero uno sold 5.6 million units in the US and UK alone, while its first week earnings totaled around $550 million. Modern Warfare 3 made $400 million in its first 24 hours. Of course, both of those games did have the benefit of being multiplatform releases.
Our own Justin Clouse gave Halo 4 a highly respectable four out of five, not everyone was so kind.
Source: Gamesindustry International
