Microsoft just loves stats, especially when those statistics tell the world how great they are. As everyone who has not been living on another planet knows, Microsoft finally released the next chapter in the Halo franchise, which is known as Halo ODST.

ODST dropped Tuesday morning and a good number of retailers launched it at midnight to excited legions of fans who were waiting to get their hands on the latest Halo title. Of course, because they were up all night playing Halo, we suspect that attendance at work and school was affected by this launch, as was evidenced by the latest news from Microsoft.

Almost one million players played ODST in the first 24 hours of release in almost 6 million games. By way of comparison ODST is leading Halo 3 by about a four to one margin in number of games played in the past 24 hours.

While the exact sales numbers have yet to be released, we have to expect that the numbers will be good for Microsoft and the release of ODST will be on target with what Microsoft expects. It still is impressive that the title saw almost a million players in the first 24 hours of release. Just think what the numbers would have looked like if they had launched it on a Friday.