Bungie parses Halo: Reach opening stats

Halo: Reach launched exclusively for the Xbox 360 on September 14, and before the week was out, Microsoft and Bungie already had a significant win to tout. During its first 24 hours on the market, Halo: Reach logged sales to the tune of $200 million in the US and Europe alone. That figure easily bested Halo 3's $170 million day-one sales, though it also came up well shy of the $310 million high-water mark set by the multiplatform Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Today, Bungie has returned to offer a more granular look at the performance of its final entrant in the Halo franchise before shifting focus to its Activision project. Though Bungie didn't offer a specific player count, the Washington-based developer said that Reach's number of online unique users during the first week of availability was equivalent to that of Halo 3's unique online users over the past 45 days.

As far as concurrent users go, Halo: Reach's first-week numbers surpassed Halo 3's all-time high by more than 65 percent, Bungie said. The studio went on to note that more than 70 million games were played from September 13-20, with more than 2 million files uploaded to the File Shares server. In terms of playtime, gamers have spent more than 5,901 years combined in online games.

Despite the solid performance, Halo: Reach was not the top Xbox Live title for the week of September 13 in terms of unique users. After some confusion, Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 retained its seat atop the play chart, still going strong since its November 2009 launch. Bungie noted today, though, that its "sources" indicate that Halo: Reach has managed to unseat Modern Warfare 2 into week two.