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One Billionth Halo 3 Game Played
adeelarshad82 writes "Bungie recently announced that Halo 3 has served its 1 billionth game. It's an important milestone which Halo 2 failed to reach. The billionth game was played at 6:36 PM PST last Saturday and lasted three minutes and 19 seconds. The total amount of active match time exceeds 64,000 years."
Frank O'Connor, director of the Halo franchise, also made comments recently teasing future Halo games.
No, really.. Why? I can easily see that it IS a milestone, sure, but an _important_ one? Why, exactly?
We're not talking about sales figures here, it's also not a measure of the quality of the title (not that it doesn't have quality, only that "# of multiplayer games served" is hardly a metric for it -- I'm assuming that this is about ONLINE matches, not local single-player ones).. It _could_ mean something in terms of the game's longevity and reaching this mark in 1.5 years could be considered impressive.. But even here, I don't think I've ever seen other publishers announcing the number of online matches played on their games, and how fast they got to THEIR milestones, so again we don't really have that much data to compare this to and therefore no way to determine whether this is indeed impressive or not.
I mean, I keep thinking of the likes of Counter-Strike (both versions of it), Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, to name a few.. All Steam titles, and they regularly publish extensive statistics for the games they host and yet I've never seen them tout this particular metric.
I dunno, it sounds like McDonnalds advertising style to me.. In fact the original announcement post pretty much mimmicks that campaign.
Kudos to Bungie and all, and I can certainly see why THEY are excited, but other than the data they've provided for Halo 2, we really don't have enough to say whether this is truly impressive or just deserving of a lukewarm "well done".