Goldman-Sachs expects first-week sales of Bungie"s shooter to reach about $170 million, giving Microsoft"s gaming division its first profitable quarter. There"s no question that Halo 3 is going to be big. Several weeks ago, a rumor surfaced that GameStop had already collected an outlandish 4 million preorders for the game. Today, a quartet of Goldman-Sachs analysts released their own projections for the game"s September 25 launch, with numbers nearly as gaudy.
While Halo 3 is releasing right at the end of Microsoft"s first fiscal 2008 quarter (which runs from July through September), Goldman-Sach"s industry watchers are expecting the game to contribute about $170 million in revenue for the quarter, with more than 4.2 million copies shipped into the retail channel. That"s nearly one copy for every three Xbox 360s in the world, going by the analysts" projections of an installed user base of 13.2 million by September.