Halo franchise has sold 46 million games

And Halo 4 isn't even out yet.

According to Microsoft, 46 million Halo games have been sold since the series helped propel the original Xbox to success.

Since Halo 3 in 2007, Halo games have released at a rate of one per year, with Halo 4 being 2012's major holiday Xbox 360 exclusive. It may seem a little odd to make this proclamation right now with Halo 4 likely to bring the series up to a nice, clean 50 million units sold, but hey. There it is.

In other numbers, the series has generated more than $3 billion in revenue, and been played for a total of 5 billion hours on Xbox Live. To put that in perspective, that's more than 570,000 years, which is almost three times as long as the modern version of the human being has existed. Ack.

Staff article by Rhody Tobin (October 31, 2012) Rhody likes to press the keys on his keyboard. Sometimes the resulting letters form strings of words that kind of make sense when you think about them for a moment. Most times they're just random gibberish that should be ignored. Ball-peen wobble glurk.