- Microsoft reports that Halo 3 earned an estimated $170 million in its first 24 hours on sale, beating Halo 2, which pulled in $125 million during the same period. Other broken records include: (1) Fastest pre-selling game ever with 1.7 million copies, (2) Over one-million Xbox LIVE members played online during its first 20-hours, the biggest day in Xbox LIVE gaming history.
- GamePro reports Halo 3 caused a "minor" Xbox LIVE hiccup, which should only be surprising to those of you who've never, ever in a million years experienced a DSL or Cable Modem outage when your provider multicasts some local sports event. Symptoms reportedly include Xbox LIVE freeze-ups, which I'm happy to report I've seen none of in all my time fragging or chasing chumps in "Infection." GamePro also reports Halo 3 may be causing Xbox 360 failures. Whether this has to do with the disc scratching issue or it's just one-off anecdotal evidence remains to be seen.
- A few sites and message boards suggested that gaming news ground to a halt in the wake of Halo 3's release, which of course is silly since it didn't, though the media hype certainly did. Look at it this way, guys, the media does the same thing with movies and books and always has. How many book-related media events have there been this summer since Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows came out? The mainstream media is hardly "ignoring the game industry," they're simply ignoring anything that isn't going to generate a bazillion clicks.
- Speaking of Harry, MarketWatch counters the generalization that Halo 3 was somehow the "biggest launch ever" by pointing out that HP7 may in fact have sold more dollar-wise than Scholastic's official $166 million figure -- upwards of $290.4 million, depending on what sold what pricing-wise (remember the book was deeply discounted at places like Amazon.com). Whatever the case, it seems Microsoft probably sold around 2.83 million units compared to 8.3 million in "Potter" sales.
- Fox News reviews Halo 3, calling it "good, but not spectacular," and employing an annoying AP style that grates on my eyes, i.e. just about every sentence is its own paragraph.
Sort of.
Like.
This.
With a few extra words per line.
Just in case you didn't get the author's point.
- MaxConsole has pictures up suggesting at least some of the new Halo 3 Limited Edition Xbox 360s are shipping with the new 65nm processors and graphic chips, letting them gobble less power and run cooler (and presumably less noisier). Check it out if you want instructions on how to verify you're a lucky owner, though fair warning, it involves disassembling your console.
And enjoy Halo 3 this weekend (if you haven't been already, all you happy hooky players).
