14 DAY TRIAL // The careful scheduling of the fall season means that Halo 5: Guardians managed to easily get the number one position in the United Kingdom video game sales charts during its first week on sale, but the performance of the new title featuring Master Chief might point to a long-term decline for the franchise.
The experience will probably continue to stay at number one for another week, with Fallout 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 having the best chance to take it down, and might also dominate the NPD Group numbers for the month of October in the United States.
Users on NeoGAF have compiled figures for as many games linked to the series as possible, and Halo 5: Guardians is reported to have moved around 150,000 units to players in the United Kingdom, not taking into account those copies that were ordered via digital stores.
This performance is better than that of last year's Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the first game in the franchise that arrived on the Xbox One, which managed to sell only 96,000 units.
But Halo 5: Guardians failed to be as popular during its first week as Halo 4, which was the final title that arrived on the Xbox 360 and managed to move 336,000 copies to gamers during its first week back in 2012.
Of course, that performance might be linked to the much bigger install base of the device at that point.
The performance posted by Halo 5: Guardians also compares negatively with Reach, ODST but manages to be better than the one of strategy spin-off Halo Wars.
Microsoft has not made any official comment about the number of copies it has sold and will probably wait for about one month before delivering official data.
Halo 5: Guardians will be supported in the long term
The company has been aggressively marketing the new Master Chief video game, saying that it is one of the reasons that will drive gamers to pick up an Xbox One during the holiday shopping season.
A worse than expected performance might mean that the home console will be unable to reach its goal of delivering more units to gamers than the rival PlayStation 4 from Sony.
343 Industries and Microsoft have said that they have long-term plans to keep Halo 5: Guardians relevant.
A big content update is expected during November and is designed to introduce the Big Team Battle mode and the maps associated with it.
At the same time, 343 Industries has mentioned tweaks to spawning, matchmaking, the REQ system and more, all of them based on the feedback that has been offered by the player base.
In December, 343 Industries is promising that it will launch a Forge for Halo 5: Guardians, which will include a range of new functionality.
For the first year of the title's life, 343 Industries will offer free maps to all players to make sure that the community remains united, with the REQ system designed to provide the revenue that the studio requires to deliver new content.