The game only sold 1 million copies in North America and 0.6 million copies rest of the world according to VGchartz.
Compared to Halo 3 which sold 11 million worldwide and Reach about 8 million, I think we can safely say Halo Anniversary was a commercial failure.
No new updates or map packs have been released, Halo 2 Anniversary is doomed forever.
> The game only sold 1 million copies in North America and 0.6 million copies rest of the world according to VGchartz.
>
> Compared to Halo 3 which sold 11 million worldwide and Reach about 8 million, I think we can safely say Halo Anniversary was a commercial failure.
>
> No new updates or map packs have been released, Halo 2 Anniversary is doomed forever.
A) It was never released for Sales Competition or anything of the sort. 343i took it upon themselves to re-release a classic game that helped change the gaming industry.
B) Halo 3 was meant to be played on a long term scale over years. CEA was meant to relive a nostalgic title in HD.
C) There were never intended to be any updates. It was a standalone Remake of the original for the sole purpose of honor. It wasn’t exactly a huge budget to make so it’s not like they “failed” either.
What are the development costs for a small studios time, only one years worth, for a game they didn’t even have to make, just clean up? 1 million? 2 million? Probably not 10 million. So 1.6 million copies sold x $40 a copy => $60 million.
Looks like it was a commercial success.
Looking forward to halo 2 remake
These types of threads are getting old. I believe OP is just trolling because Frankie said that Anniversary was never meant to actually make a lot of profit.
Its the 88th best selling game on the 360, if it were any other game it would not be considered a failure by anyone. That being said Anniversary was almost undoubtedly a small disappointment in terms of sales, just not a massive one.
If he was serious (The OP I mean) then I would rebuttle that; I would taken everything from Reach and recreated it into the CEAnny version. The AR, design, bloom. Just a thought.
> The game only sold 1 million copies in North America and 0.6 million copies rest of the world according to VGchartz.
>
> Compared to Halo 3 which sold 11 million worldwide and Reach about 8 million, I think we can safely say Halo Anniversary was a commercial failure.
We can’t “safely say” anything without knowing the budgetary aspects. Judging by the looks of things, there’s a good chance that CEA was incredibly cheap to make, despite all the features.
-Aesthetic-only development; there was effectively 0 in-game mechanical and gameplay design work (aside from the new features)
-In-game visual work (probably by far the largest part of the project) was outsourced to less expensive Russian workplaces
-Tons of asset reuse drastically reduced modelling costs
-Very little quality control spent on Anniversary graphics; numerous areas could have been collision-matched better without aesthetic tradeoffs, some areas suffer from low performance in bizarre ways, and some areas flat-out aren’t even finished on a rough-draft level (observe some of the canyon top stuff on AotCR/TB from a banshee, for instance)
-Very little quality control spent on making sure that Anniversary’s classic content behaved as it should; there was nothing done to make the port behave like HCE rather than HPC, and Classic Mode has numerous visual issues that even go beyond those inherited from Halo PC.
-Very little quality control spent on CEA in general; sloppy menus (in terms of both interface and music), weird bugs (like the people complaining about permanent white screens), implimenting online coop via crude lockstep networking models…
My point here isn’t specifically that CEA is bad, as that’s a rather tricky and somewhat subjective issue, but rather that it’s hard to dispute that it was comparatively extremely cheap to make. Comparing it to Halo’s 3 and Reach, both of which had much larger development and marketting costs, in terms of pure sales and then calling it a failure is ridiculous.
(Also of consideration is that Halo’s 3 and Reach were seemingly huge successes. Even games with much larger development costs than Anniversary could sell horribly compared with Halo 3 and still be considered successful products.)
It wasn’t really a failure. It was meant to be a remake for the original Halo CE fans. That and a remake made for Halo fans in general who might have missed the first Halo game which started this all for us. As far as I’m concerned, they did just fine with it. However as for the maps and Halo: Reach, I think they’re doing a very poor job. But lets just talk about Halo 1 for now.
1.6 million copies were sold from an HD-port of a 10 year old game that doesn’t have a Beta-key?
That’s awesome.
How many CEA-DLCs were sold along side that?
What are the campaign achievement completion %'s like? (I’m 1K and have helped many friends get the difficult few). I’d prove I have a 1:17-remaining completion on the Maw, no flips Legendary, but there’s no Theatre 
It was never intended to be blockbuster game of the year material. I would have thought you’d have figured that one out by now.
Big deal, 343i made profit anyway.
Anniversary was supposed to be a small game, not the next big thing. It did exactly what it was supposed to, please new and veteran Halo fans by remastering the game that began Halo. It allowed old fans to relive the epic moments of CE in shiny new graphics, and let new fans experience what made Halo a revolutionary title. Besides, what would you expect from a game with less than a year of production (compared to the 3 years of other Halo games), a smaller budget compared to other games, and a smaller developmental focus compared to other games (of the 200+ working at 343i, 200 were.focused on Halo 4). Anniversary can not be considered a fail if it wasn’t meant to be anything big.
It was worth the push to make a name for 343i. They needed something to get a early start on Halo fans so they started simple and i think it was a great investment…
It’s a fact that REMAKES always sell less than original games. It beat golden eye though.
They would have got more sales if they include the rest of the reach maps with it like halo 3:odst
Maybe failure was too strong of a word but it defintly undersold otherwise where would the other Map Pack be that they said would happen if sales were good?
That doesn’t seem like a failure to me by any means. Sure, we (the community) might have been expecting it to get a few more sales than that, but it still did quite good for itself.
You sure have a stupid definition of failure.
Halo Anniversary was made on the cheap (compared to most games of that size). It needed no game design work at all. Art and sound design would have been less work than normal. Programming tools,game systems, etc would have been much less than normal as well. Even the amount of marketing they did for it pales in comparison to what they did for Reach.
I’m not trying to belittle the good work that was done. I’m just saying, compared to to building a new game from the ground up, Anniversary was much cheaper.
Selling 1.6 million copies should have easily given them a return on that. For a game that has that has no established franchise power, 1.6 million sales would be phenomenal. Given that Halo Anniversary wasn’t a full-on production like one of the mainline Halo games, I’m sure it did fine and Microsoft came out on top. Sure, if Halo 4 does similar sales, MS will probably be dissappointed. Why you think this game needs DLC or map packs to be considered a success, I have no idea. That makes no sense.
I think selling a million copies for a game that everyone bought again just to see it in modern graphics.
Is pretty damn good. It was the same game to. All they did was make it look prettier. Everything else was the same.
In sales, yeah, it didn’t do too well. But first of all, let me tell you that it is not a new game it is just a remake. You’re basically paying 25 dollars for a campaign and the other 15 for a Reach map pack. I pre-ordered the game to get my bonus, but I was disappointed when the MC avatar costume was released on the Marketplace. They should have kept it exclusive. Anyways, with so many good games out this year (I mean 2011) it is hard to pick up Anniversary. There is Skyrim, MW3, so many games. Many people even already have Combat Evolved on their old Xbox or downloaded from Xbox Marketplace. Anniversary doesn’t bring anything new to the table except a bit altered experience. And it is unrealistic for 343 to make a lot of money from this one game, but in Halo 4 I think they will do really well. They haven’t put the most of time into Anniversary anyway. And it’s only 40 dollars. Still a very good game and as others said it delivered what it was supposed to.
(Except classic CE multiplayer, but that’s okay because I think 343 is using the time on Halo 4).
Lol. Most devs would KILL to have their NEW game sell 1.6 million copies. Nevermind their 10 year old port.