I'm the last guy you want prognosticating how well a game will do. I know what I like, but I can't figure you people out for the life of me. A mediocre shooter like Call of Duty: World at War sells 6 million copies?

So I can't help but second guess my opinion that Halo Wars, regardless of what I think of the game itself, will be a game without an audience. Here we have a real time strategy game adapted to a console system in a serviceable but not particularly clever way. And it's based on a wildly successful shooter. A console RTS aimed primarily at the guys who play Halo? What are they going to think? And is the average real time strategy gamer going to care about Master Chiefs, grunts, elites, and the Flood? I'd guess no.

Yet Major Nelson, the face of Xbox Live, says on his blog that the Halo Wars demo set a record for the most downloads on its first day. Furthermore, 2 million people downloaded it in its first five days. There's no indication whether these people actually liked it, or whether they just went back to teabagging each other, but the interest is definitely there.