Those limited edition Halo 5 bundles cost $500 a pop, a bigger price tag than more than 8 copies of the core game itself combined. Even if it sold only 250k units worldwide we're talking about $125 million in revenue just from the LE consoles themselves, which would mean that at most there were only about 4.5 million copies of the game itself sold.

NPD results are a week from tomorrow, so we'll find out exactly how many copies it sold in the U.S., though an accurate global tally will remain elusive. That's what I hate about PR. When numbers are good, they'll be really exact about it, but when things aren't looking as good as they hoped we see the publisher dance around the results and try to puff them up.

Halo 5 obviously had a good debut, but it's entirely possible that in terms of copies sold it didn't do any better than previous titles. Apparently, it sold worse than any previous main series Halo games in the UK, and in Japan it sold diddly squat (7455 copies in the first five days according to Media Create; Halo 3 sold 55k in Japan first week). In the U.S., Halo 3 pulled 3.3 million copies in Sept. 2007, with Reach and Halo 4 doing about the same in their respective debuts, so we'll find out next week how Halo 5 stacks up to them.