UPDATE: Well, apparently Halo: Campaign Evolved is actually selling even worse than we originally thought.

Alinea Analytics has published a new set of estimates putting Halo: Campaign Evolved at 1.2 million copies sold after two weeks, considerably below the roughly 1.56 million figure previously reported after its first week. So how the hell has Halo managed to lose sales? Obviously, it hasn’t. Instead, Alinea has changed what it’s counting.

In its original report, Alinea estimated around 900,000 copies on Xbox, alongside 452,000 on PlayStation and 212,000 on Steam. However, it turns that Xbox number also included Game Pass subscribers who paid an additional $20 for the Premium Pass, which included up to five days of early access. Alinea says just under 600,000 Game Pass players bought that upgrade.

Those upgrades have now been removed from Alinea’s “copies sold” data.

That’s a fairly important distinction that wasn’t mentioned in the original August 4 article. Rhys Elliott did clarify it in the comments after somebody specifically asked whether the 900,000 Xbox figure included Game Pass players, but without seeing that comment there was no obvious reason to think the figure wasn’t simply referring to copies of the game sold.

And this is one of the frustrations of reporting on third-party analytics. These companies can provide some incredibly useful information that publishers themselves rarely disclose, but without knowing exactly how the underlying data is being classified, it’s very easy to end up comparing apples to oranges. I certainly wouldn’t have considered somebody paying $20 to upgrade their existing Game Pass access to be another “copy sold”.

For comparison, the other platforms have moved upwards exactly as you’d expect over the additional week. PlayStation has increased from 452,000 to 544,000 copies, while Steam has gone from 212,000 to 232,000.

There is one other oddity worth mentioning: Alinea’s newest numbers don’t entirely add up. It says the 1.2 million sales are split roughly 42% Xbox, 41% PlayStation and 17% Steam, but it also lists PlayStation at 544,000, Steam at 232,000 and describes Xbox sales as slightly higher than PlayStation. Those individual figures would put total sales somewhere above 1.3 million rather than 1.2 million.

So take the exact total with the usual pinch of salt. The important takeaway is that Alinea’s revised methodology puts actual copies sold substantially below what its original figures suggested.

Let’s just treat it all as ballpark figures. But even if you doubled the game’s sales, Halo: Campaign Evolved would still have soft sales.

ORIGINAL STORY: The Master Chief has returned in Halo: Campaign Evolved. So with the launch behind us, how is the game doing in terms of copies sold? Surely the iconic Halo franchise is kicking some ass? Well, maybe not.

There is a big caveat to keep in mind before we jump into the numbers: the game has only been available for 8 days at the time of writing, and 13 days if you include the early access period for Premium Edition buyers. Still, the vast majority of a game’s sales are made in the first few days, so we can get a pretty decent idea of how it’s doing.

According to Rhys Elliott at Alinea Analytics – who tend to be pretty damn close with their numbers, but are not perfect- Halo: Campaign Evolved is currently sitting at around 1.56 million copies sold across all platforms, which seems…kind of low for a Halo game, really. I guess the series really doesn’t have the appeal it once did.

What caught me by surprise was just how little it has sold on PlayStation. I had assumed that Xbox’s most iconic figure would shift copies like crazy on novelty factor alone, but that is not the case. The data says just 351k on PlayStation, accounting for 29% of the total sales.

On Steam, it’s 212k, and Xbox takes the win with 900k, which is actually not too shabby considering it’s also on Game Pass.

For comparison, we just learned that the ports of the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2, which just released, sold a combined 11.2 million copies on PlayStation alone. I can’t imagine the Master Chief is pleased with this.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launched to pretty good critic reviews and the what is now the expected technical problems on PC. Since then, the player numbers on Steam have dropped steadily – which isn’t surprising since there’s no multiplayer – and the player reviews have remained “mixed”. The community seems to be souring on the remake as time goes on, too.

As for Halo Studios themselves, reporting has been mixed. There are claims that the team has nothing currently in development and that the planned remakes of Halo 2 and 3 might not be happening, despite it previously being said in May that they were already in active development before Halo: Campaign Evolved had even launched.

The future is looking messy, then, especially for Halo on PlayStation. When they announced Halo: Campaign Evolved for PlayStation, they also claimed all future Halo games would come to Sony’s machine. Xbox has been reversing its plans lately by bringing back Xbox exclusives, but also said they would honour promises, hence Campaign Evolved. But since they also promised Halo would be on PlayStation going forward, what’s the play going to be? And how will the low impact of Campaign Evolved on PlayStation effect those plans?