4.2 Million Halo 3 copies at stores worldwide this week. New ad shows Halo live-action intro to Halo 3

25 September 2007

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Posted by:Ferry

Halo 3 has launched today with a huge amount of hype. Goldman Sachs analysts Sarah Friar and Frederick Grieb now predict that Microsoft will have shipped a mighty 4.2 million copies of Halo 3 into the retail channel by the end of the month. That’s a big-enough launch shipment for more than a third of the Xbox 360′s 11.6 million global user base to pick up a copy.

While the original Xbox had a larger installed user base of almost 20 million when Halo 2 came out in November of 2004. Halo 2 sold nearly 2.4 million copies on its first day on the market, and Friar and Grieb estimate that Microsoft had shipped 7.5 million copies by the end of 2004, which would have accounted for 38% of the installed user base (it went on to sell 9.2 million!). While Halo 3 has yet to launch in Europe (26th) and Japan (27th) the American pre-orders for today’s release there went up to 1.5 million before launch. Good times for Microsoft’s gaming division, as this will be their first profitable quarter since the original Xbox launched with Halo in 2001.

Here’s the latest brand new live-action Halo 3 short, that’s made by the Halo Movie director Neill Blomkamp. This video shows what happens before you start your campaign as Master Chief in Halo 3. Real intense!