MS Celebrates Worldwide Halo 3 Success

Tops in Japan, Europe and the US, Halo 3 goes big around the globe.

In its first week on sale Halo 3 has made a gigantic $300 million (about £150 million) in worldwide sales, Microsoft said on Thursday.

Company boss Bill Gates called the game a cultural phenomenon, saying it marks "an important milestone for Xbox 360 and for video games as entertainment and as an art form".

Gates said that Halo 3 "embodies our vision for the future of entertainment, where some of the world's greatest creative minds will deliver a new generation of interactive storytelling."

Even in Japan, normally not a country to get enthralled by first-person shooters, the game is a hit.

The latest weekly Japanese charts show Halo 3 sitting right on top, beating out new Pokémon and Final Fantasy games in the process. The shooter sold just 56,000 copies in its first week there but that was still enough to bring home the silverware.

Actual numbers for sales in the UK are tough to come by Microsoft has revealed that the game brought in £17 million, according to MCV. Halo 3 made up more than two-thirds of all Xbox 360 games sold last week and gave the hardware a boost too.

Microsoft has been reluctant to say exactly how many copies of the game it sold around the world, but Xbox Live statistics over the past week give an idea.

According to the company's own data, more than 2.7 million of the 7 million unique online IDs on Xbox Live have been online while playing Halo 3. Together, all these people have already spent 40 million hours playing the game in just the first week.

For more on Halo 3, read our thoughts on the game in our full review.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo