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Halo 4 hits US$220m sales in 24 hours

The first non-Bungie Halo game has broken a few records, both locally and overseas.

Nic Healey Senior Editor / Australia
Nic Healey is a Senior Editor with CNET, based in the Australia office. His passions include bourbon, video games and boring strangers with photos of his cat.
Nic Healey

The first non-Bungie Halo game has broken a few records, both locally and overseas.

(Credit: Microsoft/343 Industries)

Halo 4 might be the most expensive game Microsoft has ever made, but it's seems to be worth it, racking up US$220 million in its first days of sales and on track to make over US$300 million in its first week.

This makes it the biggest entertainment release of 2012 — at least until we see the figures from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 — although, it's still a long way from the biggest in the world. That honour still belongs to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which took US$400 million in its first day.

In Australia, Microsoft is claiming that the Halo 4 launch was the largest ever Halo launch and the second largest gaming launch locally.

Halo 4 also broke records for Halo players, with 4 million players logged in the first five days of being on sale. A frightening total of 31.4 million hours have been spent playing Halo 4, pushing the total number of gameplay hours across the Halo franchise well beyond the five billion mark.

To put that figure into perspective, a single player would take 3582 years to rack up that much time on Halo 4, and 570,398 years for the whole Halo franchise.