Halo:Reach multiplayer beta hits 1.2M players in a day

Gamers already know about the overload that hit the servers in the waking hours of the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta that started on Monday. It would take a lot of people to cause that kind of slowdown. IndustryGamers caught up with Brian Jarrard of Bungie, the maker of the game, to clear up a few things about the server issues and to get Bungie’s reaction to the first day of the highly anticipated beta.

“By our counts, we had 1,170,112 unique players participate in the Reach beta through Monday. That’s already more players than we saw over the entire life of the Halo 3 beta… in the FIRST day of the Reach beta. And even more awesome — each of these nearly 1.2 million players played an average of 14 games.” See Industry Gamers for more.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.