Halo 5: Guardians sales top $400M in first week

Halo 5: Guardians has sold more than $400 million in its first week on the market, setting new records according to video game publisher Microsoft.

That pushes the lifetime sales of the Halo series to more than $5 billion. It is means that Halo 5 (check out our review of the game) has the highest week-one attach rate for any Xbox One game so far (that is, it has the highest percentage of console owners purchasing the game for any Xbox One title to date). These are great numbers, and they should help Microsoft in its constant battle with Sony to make the Xbox One game console as popular as the PlayStation 4.

Microsoft didn’t say exactly how many copies it sold. But based on a $60 retail price, the number could be over 6.6 million sold so far. Halo 5: Guardians has a rating of 85 out of 100 on game review aggregator Metacritic. It is the highest-rated Xbox One exclusive title to date.

So far, fans of the game, developed by Microsoft’s 343 Industries studio, have logged more than 21 million hours in the game, including 12 million hours in the campaign mode. The multiplayer modes have been played 9 million total hours with nearly 7 million multiplayer matches across Arena and the new Warzone mode. This is all according to Microsoft.

Halo 5 has a new Requisition System, where you can earn points to get better equipment in Warzone battles. Players have gotten more than 45 million REQ packs and 568 million REQ cards.

Halo 5: Live also earned a Guinness World Records “title” for the most-watched video game launch broadcast, with more than 330,000 unique streams on the evening of the broadcast. Content from the broadcast generated 5.5 million total views throughout the week. That led to the game becoming the best-selling digital game ever in the Xbox store for an opening week. On Twitch, people watched more than 3 million hours of Halo 5. Again, these stats are from Microsoft.

“The success of Halo 5: Guardians is a testament to the innovative work from the entire team at 343 Industries to bring this installment to Xbox One and the incredible community of fans who have come to love the story, characters and gameplay central to the franchise,” said Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, in a statement. “The game represents all the possibilities of Xbox One and has earned its place as the anchor title in the greatest holiday games lineup in Xbox history.”

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. 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.