Halo5_KeyArt_Horiz_FinalXbox chief Phil Spencer really wasn’t overstating anything when he told a GeekWire Summit audience this month that “Halo is Xbox.”

“It’s the reason Xbox still exists,” he said.

The two brands have been intertwined ever since they debuted together more than a decade ago. And now, as Xbox One plays catch-up against Sony going into the holiday season, Microsoft is once again counting on its trusty all-star to come through. It will be a pivotal moment for Microsoft when the latest installment, Halo: 5 Guardians, hits shelves tomorrow.

“We say, ‘We’ve got a Halo release that’s on this console, your [backward compatibility] games will work on this console, we think we have a good price,’” Spencer said. “So for us, there’s a lot of reasons to believe in what Halo 5 can do for us.”

Microsoft’s 343 Industries, the Kirkland-based studio behind the game, has been working on the title for years. Spencer says it’s the first Halo game built from the ground up for the Xbox One, it has a beefed up storyline and technology advancements like support for 60 frames per second video playback throughout the game.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, at the 2015 GeekWire Summit.
Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, at the 2015 GeekWire Summit.

But the sales gap between Playstation and Xbox has been growing steadily since this generation of consoles debuted in 2013, and now it looks like even a blockbuster success is unlikely to drive a comeback.

Michael Pachter, a video game analyst with Wedbush Securities, said Halo 5 will be a blockbuster video game release, but nothing more. He predicts Microsoft will sell 8 million copies, but it’s not going to drive enough console sales to be a life preserver.

He said players who are big enough fans to be swayed by Halo are already on team Xbox. There will probably be some who will upgrade from older models to be able to play the new game, but he doubts it’ll be stealing many customers from Sony.

“I think [Sony’s lead] is something we’ve all expected and the outcome will be exactly what we expected,” he said, adding that a Halo release is about as big of a deal as a new Mario game from Nintendo.

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Microsoft recently said it’s focusing less on console sales volume and more on engagement with gamers, as measured by Xbox Live monthly active users. With a massive following of online gamers, the new Halo game is poised to give Xbox Live a big lift.

Halo has been a big part of Microsoft’s business for a while, as the franchise has now tallied more than $4 billion in combined sales since the original Halo debuted in 2001. That first game set the stage for a record-breaking $125 million in sales within 24 hours of the Halo 2 release in 2004, $170 million when Halo 3 was released in 2007, $200 million by Halo Reach in 2010 and $220 million by Halo 4 in 2012.

Those numbers tend to get lost in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, which counted more than $4 billion in revenue the quarter Halo 4 was released.

But Eric Handler, a longtime video game analyst for MKM Partners, said there’s a lot more to Halo than game sales. The title is an Xbox exclusive, so it’s one of Microsoft’s most valuable differentiators in the console wars. It drives everything from the sale of merchandise to subscriptions to the online gaming platform Xbox Live.

He said this Halo installment is set to be as big as ever, but one game can only do so much.

“I don’t think we’re going to see a situation where all of the sudden Microsoft is able to catch up to Sony,” Handler said. “But this is something that Xbox fans have been waiting for, and now it’s here. From that standpoint, it’s big.”

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