Slashdot Mirror
Mass Effect Sells A Million, Halo 3 Sells Five
Sales news is starting to trickle out for some of the big Fall games, with the Xbox 360 so far looking very strong. BioWare's Mass Effect has sold a million copies, while Bungie's blockbuster Halo 3 has already sold over five million copies since its September 25th release date. That last figure comes from a GameDaily interview with Xbox Marketing VP Jeff Bell. Aside from noting this week's release of Halo 3's first downloadable map pack, Bell also connected these sales back to the console itself: "The reaction has been very positive. In fact, we saw incredible sales of Xbox 360 for the week of November 18, including Black Friday of more than 310,000 Xbox 360 in the U.S. alone. This is really strong momentum for us given that we're already in our third year on the market."
I know it's five million, but that just read funny.
We sold five whole copies of Halo 3! Pop the boxed champaign!!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
So, now that you've got these impressive sales, how long until Microsoft's gaming division finally turns a profit?
My roommate has a 360 and he has spent the last two years babbling about how powerful the 360 is supposed to be and I think the guy has moved beyond fanboyism and straight into delusion.
Halo 3 looks like a last gen game. It's filled with jaggies all over the place. The framerate seems to drop into the low 20s often. I hear that the game isn't even running at 720p. I was shocked when I came home one day and didn't even realize he had gotten his copy of Halo 3 and I thought he was still playing Halo 2.
Mass Effect is a complete graphical basketcase. The problems with texture loading being delayed. The horrendous framerate in places. Outside of the closeups for dialog the game looks like a last gen game.
These were supposed to be the two 'big games' that would finally show that the 360 didn't deserve the Xbox 1.5 label.
At least in the US and Europe. And it's enough, even with bad sales in Japan, to say it has good sales. So this is no surprise.
And it's clearly the best mover of games (please spare me Sport and Play since the opportunity for 3rd parties to have their games inlcuded with the console or a second remote is slim to none) based on sales.
Even when looking at games available on all systems, the 360 cleans up.
It was a great fall for the 360 considering the releases:
Halo, Guitar Hero 3, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Assassians Creed, Mass Effect, Rock Band, amongst other lesser titles.
That's a pretty impressive list for people that like "games". And what is being missed by some is that in those titles there's really some new things. Orange Box has Portal. AC took interactive environments to a new level letting you scale nearly every single building in the game. Rock band is rock band. Mass Effect introduced a new dialog system to the new standard for action-RPG's that let the game unfold like a movie.
...is accounted to scratched disks?
I'm wondering myself what the return rate on the release was.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
But I don't like any of the games you mentioned about and I own a Wii, but keep (fairly) up with gaming news. Does that make me a bad person, an outlier, or is it possible there are a lot of people like me?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Also, note that the latest version of Madden NFL is in the same ballpark for number of units sold as Halo if you count all versions of Madden.
Honestly, the games section of Slashdot sounds more like a Microsoft propaganda machine. Anything from bashing Sony, to only talking about the release of XBox 360 exclusives, to allowing Microsoft to defend it's points system, to giving out statistics of it's sales success. Not only that, but most of the articles are submitted by the editor himself, Zonk.
Anyone else think Zonk is a paid shill, or a overzealous fanboy?
movie at 11.