After the launch of Halo 3 and its record breaking first week sales of 3.8 million, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the game would see long term success. It seems that as of Aug 8th 2009 Halo 3 became the third best selling console game, hitting the 10 million mark and only bested by COD4: Modern Warfare and GTA IV.

Will Halo 3 surpass Modern Warfare and GTA IV? The answer is to be determined but there are factors working both for and against it. The game is being bundled with the Elite 360 hardware so new adopters of the system will be getting copies of Halo 3 just for buying the system which will boost sales numbers for the game. But the release of Halo 3: ODST may prove to slow the growth of Halo 3. However the release of the next GTA and Modern Warfare 2 will also slow the growth of those two game’s predecessors. Third place isn’t a bad position to be in and selling 10 million copies of any game is a feat to be respected. The question now becomes, can ODST beat Halo 3’s first week sales record? We dare you to try Bungie!