Halo Reach Made $200,000,000.00 On Launch Day

[Update: I muddled up the figures between copies sold and money generated – I mentioned that the game generated sales of around $120,000,000.00 from pre-orders alone, but the information given now shows that they made a further $80,000,000.00 or so on the first day. Thanks Ewie for pointing it out.]

In my editorial regarding the my experience buying Halo Reach, I mentioned in the beginning that Halo Reach had already generated over $120,000,000.00 or R900,000,000.00 before it even hit a single shelf.

Last night, Major Nelson tweeted that in its opening day, Halo Reach sold 2 million copies, but hang on… the numbers I used for my calculations were based on the fact that Microsoft claimed that pre-orders had already hit 2 million a short while ago.

Something doesn’t add up.

We have an obvious case of Microsoft either providing false numbers for their pre-orders or the amazing scenario where they only sold a proverbial handful of copies in stores. There are also two ways to look at that. Either the game was so popular that it generated 90-something percent of its sales through pre-order, or the general public was not hyped up enough to buy the game when they saw it on the shelf that day. Considering that even locally, I was one of the few people who walked into a store to buy it, rather than having ordered it beforehand, I guess I can believe something like that.

First day sales are usually a good indication of a title’s popularity with the core gamer, so in this case I am actually more interested to see how its first week, or month of sales look, as well as another gander at the stats after Christmas.

Source: Major Nelson (Twitter Account)

Last Updated: September 16, 2010