A week after its debut on Xbox One, Halo 5: Guardians is carrying the weight of expectation that has been surrounding it, with the game one of the most important entries in the Halo series thus far (especially after the botched launch of The Master Chief Collection last year).
Thanks to the impressive returns enjoyed in its first seven days on the market, it seems that Guardians is really delivering for Microsoft. As revealed over on Xbox Wire, Halo 5 has set a new record for the franchise, with the company calling it "the biggest Halo launch and fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to-date, with more than $400 million in global sales of Halo 5: Guardians games and hardware, pushing the franchise to over $5 billion lifetime."
As reported in the blog post:
"Fans have logged more than 21 million hours of total gameplay, including 12 million hours in campaign mode alone. The widely praised multiplayer modes have also led to nine million total hours played with nearly seven million multiplayer matches played across Arena and the all-new Warzone mode. In addition, Halo fans are taking to the new Requisition System in a big way, with over 45 million REQ Packs acquired, totaling more than 568 million REQ Cards.
Last week's Halo 5: Live earned a Guinness World Record™ title for the most watched video game launch broadcast, setting a precedent with more than 330,000 unique streams on the evening of the broadcast. Additionally, content from the broadcast generated 5.5 million total views throughout the week. This resulted in a spike in digital sales of Halo 5: Guardians, leading to it becoming the best-selling digital game ever in the Xbox Store for an opening week".
Quite how they've judged it the biggest Halo launch in history we're not entirely sure, perhaps they're including the money made by Halo-themed hardware sales when coming up with that, but with as many as 2 million copies of the game sold, it's still an undoubted success (to put it another way, Guardians took more money in the UK than Spectre, which ain't too shabby).
Head this way to read our review and find out what we thought of the return of Master Chief in Halo 5: Guardians (spoiler, we liked it, a lot).