Xbox Gaming in South Africa

Everybody knew Halo: Reach was going to be pretty damn popular, but just how popular has it been? Well, Bungie has looked to help us out there (and show off) by releasing a few statistics about the game's first week on the planet, and they're all kinds of impressive.

• 31,000,000 Games have been played since launch
• 98,000,000 Player-games have been recorded
• 8,214,338 Daily Challenges have been completed
• 255,996 Weekly Challenges have been completed
• 78,499,560,895 Total Credits have been earned
• 953 Man-years have been spent in matchmade games
• 1365 Man-years have been spent in campaign
• 854,107 files have been uploaded
• 577,804 recommendations have been sent to friends
• 4,619,455 files have been downloaded

Of course, if you've spent any time in matchmaking, it's probably not all that unbelievable. While Team XG was out ruling the servers on Saturday night (mostly with inadvertent Jetpack suicides and team kills), we noticed 816 000-odd other players online. Then shot most of them. That's how we roll.

Bungie has also confirmed that an update is in the works, adding in the missing Campaign Matchmaking and implementing a few "fixes for bugs and balance issues". Much like regular matchmaking, the Campaign Matchmaking will let players vote for which mission they want to play from a list. Anyone who hasn't already finished the game by then might want to avoid Campaign Matchmaking in the meantime then, or risk spoiling the surprise ending when Noble 6 turns out to be two grunts stacked on each other. Oops, too late.

Other changes being looked at is the betrayal limit, which is set to just 1. In other words, if you betray just one team mate, you could potentially be booted. Mistakes happen, and this could be increased soon, but Bungie do offer some sound advice: "Stop shooting your teammates".

Look out for XG's review of Halo: Reach tomorrow, along with an awesome competition giveaway.