Sunday, September 26, 2010
September 24 3:21 P.M.
Understatement of the year: the latest Halo game is a hit.
Having cracked the $200 million mark on its first day of release alone, Halo: Reach has already proven that there's plenty of life left in the hallowed Halo name. And just to drive home the point that their game is a big, big deal, developer Bungie has released some pretty awe-inspiring numbers the game managed to, uh, reach during its launch week.
Over 70 million online matches were logged, with players putting in nearly 6,000 years worth of time shooting at each other. When they weren't doing that, they uploaded over 2 million files and completed about 20 million daily challenges. And it wasn't all for naught, as they earned a whopping 165 billion in credits to spend on new armor.
Despite all that activity, though, Reach still came up short in one key area. According to Xbox's Major Nelson, Reach was only the second most played game Xbox Live during its launch week. The first? None other than last year's blockbuster shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which has remained a staple atop the Xbox Live chart pretty much since its release. Coming in third was Halo 3, giving Bungie a nice consolation prize.
There's another silver lining, too. Major Nelson points out that Reach has been the most popular game over the past seven days, meaning Modern Warfare 2's chart supremacy will likely come to an end soon.
But we wouldn’t count Call of Duty out for long. The next game in that franchise, Black Ops, hits stores on November 9, setting the stage for another epic battle between the two first-person heavyweights.
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