Bungie has once again garnered much critical and consumer success with their recent release of Halo: Reach – the prequel to the franchise that set the trend for quality FPS titles on consoles, prior to which were strictly a PC-only affair. Reach has been out for almost two weeks now, and in that incredibly short period of time, has already dethroned the previous king of Xbox Live, Modern Warfare 2, causing playtime to drop by 50%. Keeping in mind that MW2 has held the top spot for playtime on Xbox Live for the past 10 months, I’d say that’s quite the feat (I still feel that MW2 didn’t deserve the spot with its lack of playtesting and abundance of glitches/server issues, but that’s neither here nor there). Other top XBL titles that lost playtime included Halo 3, Red Dead Redemption, and Bad Company 2.
The news should be no surprise to those who participated in the beta for Reach – during the 2.5 week time frame, gameplay activity for Halo: ODST (required for access to the beta) increased by an astronomical 7500%. About 1/3 of Reach players have already clocked over 30 hours with the title (and considering these statistics are about 1 week old, I can only imagine how that has increased). With Bungie’s excellent online support (seriously, Bungie tracks a god-forsaken amount of information related to the game – all available online at Bungie.net) and frequent DLC updates (despite a lackluster second half to the campaign), I would be baffled to see any sort of decline in numbers within Reach’s near future. With that, I bid you adieu. I’ll see you bitches online for some SWAT and Team Snipers.
