It's hard to overestimate just how big Halo 3 is. It has tie-in beverages, long lines at stores, and people taking the rest of the week off to finish the fight; this is one of the few games that's almost a cultural event when it ships. But how well is it actually selling? According to Bungie's own server stats, there have already been 1,216,715 unique players in the last 24 hours.

Keep in mind this number doesn't include people who have yet to play the game online, so it's safe to say this is a conservative estimate on sales. The vast majority of games will never sell even 500,000 copies in their entire lifespan, and Halo 3 did it in a matter of hours.

Bungie's numbers also show that 4,669,304 online matches have been played in the last 24 hours, with 402,988,939 kills in the campaign. Many, many people are playing Halo 3, killing many, many bad guys in the campaign. It should be fun to watch the number increase as more and more gamers pick up their copies going into the weekend.