14 DAY TRIAL // A report from game tracking application Raptr shows that the newly launched first person shooter Halo: Reach, from developer Bungie and publisher Microsoft, has become the most played title on the Xbox Live service, dethroning Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which dominated the service for the last ten months.
Raptr also says that those who picked up Reach averaged about 23 hours of play time in the first week, with about a third of gamers going above 30 hours spent with the game, a good chink of those presumably dedicated to multiplayer.
On average players enjoyed the new Halo for about 2.63 hours at a time.
More than 37 percent of those tracked by Raptr managed to already complete the single player campaign of Halo: Reach, with close to 12% of them choosing the Legendary difficulty and 22.29 percent going for Heroic.
It's probably a testament to Bungie ability to craft a more engaging story for Reach that so many players are competing it, considering that lifetime statistics for Halo 3: ODST show a completion rate over 40% while for Halo 3 the figure sists at 43.21 percent.
Raptr also tracked the most played game by Halo: Reach fans:
1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 2. Halo 3 3. Red Dead Redemption 4. Battlefield Bad Company 2 5. Gears of War 2 6. Borderlands 7. Mass Effect 2 8. Call of Duty: World at War 9. Halo 3: ODST 10. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Halo: Reach is the last title in the series that will be handled by developer Bungie, who is now set to collaborate with publisher Activision Blizzard for the next ten years on a new video game universe.
The launch of Reach also pushed up sales for the Xbox 360, the platform on which it was exclusively released, with the United Kingdom showing a doubling of sales for the Microsoft home console.
The full impact of Halo: Reach will be clear when the NPD Group figures for September are released.