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."

Comments

bad article title

[techpawn]

I know it's five million, but that just read funny.

We sold five whole copies of Halo 3! Pop the boxed champaign!!

Re:bad article title

[JK_the_Slacker]

I did. The marriage ended badly. In the dorm, at least I get regular meals.

The 360 has always had good sales

[Liquidrage]

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.

Re:The 360 has always had good sales

[Pojut]

I would have to disagree...uncovering some part of the game universe via the codex, going on varied side quests, and just simply discovering more of the main plotline kept it interesting for me from the start right up until the credits began to roll. If anything (other than the obvious technical issues), my biggest gripe is that the game wasn't LONGER...I was a little upset that I finished it as quickly as I did, even with all of the side quests and such that I did. Realistically, I could have completed the main storyline in under 15 hours...a game like this should have at LEAST a 30-40 hour storyline with 15-30 hours of sidequests...a bit suprised at how short it was.

Regardless of that, it was still an awesome game...fighting was intense, storyline was interesting, the choices were truly difficult at times, and the production values were sky high. Only the second game that I have started playing a second time as soon as I finished it (the first game I played back to back like that was Secret of Mana 2)

Re:Just how much of that 5mil in sales...

[twistedsymphony]

Just how much of that 5mil in sales... ...is accounted to scratched disks?

probably none since MS offered free replacement of effected discs and that doesn't get counted in sales figures.

Re:Astroturfing?

[Liquidrage]

There's tons of Wii stories that have been on the site. Almost all positive. It's not /.'s fault the 360 is a good system that has done well. And since /. isn't based out of Japan, there really isn't much of a reason for a lot of PS3 stories.

Why are there more iPod stories then Zen stories? Hmmm, not hard to figure out.