537,452,951 Virgins Murdered in 24 Hours

So Halo 3 was released the other day. While I have an Xbox 360, I'm not a first person shooter fan, as I've previously stated in my BioShock review. I just don't get a thrill out of a game where you are exactly the same at the beginning as you are the end of the game. I enjoy building up a character and making him unique to my experience. Anyways.

Halo 3 did rack up record sales at its release and nerds from around the world waited for midnight to happen so they could be the first to buy the game in their little corner of the planet. That's a sad commentary on our life, isn't it? It racked up over $170 million in sales in the first 24 hours, and over 4.9 million multiplayer games were played within 24 hours, accounting for over 500 million virgins dying a painful death.

I really just thought that those numbers were astonishing, seeing as how that beat any movie or book -ever- released, and maybe it'll help Microsoft pull a profit from their video gaming division for the first time this year. Byran over at Hotair wrote up something about this today too.

Brief followup. I do not think that the dollar comparison is really fair here. Yes, Halo 3 did get a record dollar amount; but it is also priced at $60 each (or more if you buy the collector's edition). So, let's take the number of people buying and compare that instead.

The IGN article linked above says that Spiderman 3 took in $59 million opening day. Let's say that each ticket costs $10, then 5.9 million people went to see it. Harry Potter sold 8.3 million copies in the first day. Way more than Spiderman. At $60 each, Halo only sold 3 million copies. In that perspective, the dollar amount is a little less impressive - even though gaming has come a long way in the past 5 years or so.

So I wouldn't go crowning Microsoft as the King of all Media right now with the impressive figure. When the number of people buying a game equals or surpasses the number of people going to a movie or buying book in the first 24 hours, then I'll be impressed. And I don't doubt that Microsoft will be the company that does it either.