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More than 46 million Halo games have been sold worldwide

How many have you bought?

More than 46 million Halo games have been sold worldwide, Microsoft has revealed.

The impressive sales figure is for all Halo games, from 2001's ground-breaking Halo: Combat Evolved to last year's Halo: Combat Evolved remake, Anniversary.

All in all, the Halo franchise has made nearly $3 billion from sales. That'll be why there's a Halo 4 then.

Halo: Reach, Halo creator Bungie's last Halo game, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release. This figure eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3.

Microsoft will hope Halo 4, which has cost more to make than any Microsoft game, will make even more money than Reach and do well enough to beat the figures posted by Bond film Skyfall.

Let's go back a little bit. Halo 3, which launched in September 2007, achieved first day sales of $170 million in the US. That broke all previous single day entertainment launch records and the previous record held by Halo 2 ($125 million). Of course, these days Call of Duty holds all the records, but for a single-platform game Halo doesn't do too bad.

More fun facts: Microsoft said today more than five billion hours of gameplay has been logged by players while connected to Xbox Live.

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