: Global sales for past Halo games have always been mostly North America sales;
: 60-80% of all sales are here. I don't see any good reason why this would
: change for Halo 5, so '$400 Million in Global Sales' should correspond to
: at least 300 million here in North America - how do you generate that much
: money without selling more than a million copies of the game?

Well, the PR includes "hardware," which obviously includes the special edition Halo 5 bundles and possibly also the Halo 5 edition gamepads. No mention if "sales" is "sold through to retailers (i.e., shipments)" or "sold to customers." PR for all three first parties do frequently conflate "shipments" with "sales" even though the two are almost never congruent. Video game companies do have a habit of dancing around the exact sold-to-customers numbers and often try to fluff up numbers whenever they can, especially when the news isn't as good as most thought, and for that reason I found the MS PR about "$400 million" kind of dodgy.

The XBO sold 303k units in October. As the U.S. represents about 60% of the global Xbox market, we can estimate at round 500k units sold units globally for the month. While we dont' have anthing concrete about how many units the Halo 5 bundle sold, let's assume it was half the total (it was the #1 XBO SKU on Amazon for both October and August, so it did well on launch month and with preorders; Amazon has generally been a good metric for relative hardware sales this generation). If 250k units of the Halo 5 bundle were sold, then assuming a $500 MSRP that adds up to $125,000,000. If the Halo 5 bundle was two-thirds of all XBO hardware sold in October, that could drive the revenue generated from that source up to about $165 million. Assuming the NPD figure is right Halo 5 must have grossed no less than $56 million in the U.S. in its first six days. It was probably more than that thanks to special editions. Even assuming 20% of copies sold were digital sales, first week U.S. sales must have been no more than $90 million. Assuming that's 60% of the global market, that could bring the software total up to $150-160 million. So, we may have accounted for $275-325 million. If Halo 5 edition gamepads are included with "hardware," so assuming half a million of those were sold that's another $30 million. Even then we're still short of the $400 million MS claimed.

At this point there's only three possibilities: 1) that $400 million figure was shipments, not sales; 2) NPD made a massive error in their reporting; or 3) Halo 5 set some kind of massive record for digital copies as a percent of total copies (I'm talking closer to PC levels; like I said, the average for the "AAA" console market is 5-6%, while high-end percentages are in the 15-20% range).