Square-Enix has been smiling from ear to ear today, as they announced that Final Fantasy XIII is the fasting selling title in the entire franchise's history. With sales of the game reaching one million in the first five days in North America alone, combined with the huge amount sold in Europe, Final Fantasy XIII has "recorded the largest first-week sales in franchise history."
Of course, this is the first Final Fantasy title released on two platforms simultaneously, as well as the first on this generation of consoles, which has definitely contributed to the amount of copies sold.
With Final Fantasy XIII being a week old outside of Japan, VGChartz is reporting 1.2 million copies sold, bringing the total to just over 3 million copies sold worldwide.
According to the reported figures, there is a split of 61% to 39% in sales in favour of the PlayStation 3 worldwide. We know how the console split went in the UK, so by breaking these figures down in all regions, how do things look?
Final Fantasy has in recent years been a very PlayStation orientated franchise, but when Square Enix announced it would be coming to the Xbox 360, many were curious as to how it would sell.
Well, we have some information, for the UK at least, where Chart-Track have disclosed that the PlayStation 3 version of Final Fantasy XIII contributed 54 percent of total sales. Considering the amount of marketing Microsoft has been doing, with the Xbox 360 bundle, and Xbox 360 exclusive TV ads, some might actually see this is something of a failure. However, they have still managed to take a huge chunk out of Sony's profits, so from that perspective it was still a result.
Much has been made of Dissidia: Final Fantasy. It was in theory every Final Fantasy fan's dream, and it has the potential to even bring in players who might normally be put off by the RPG nature of the series. Given this, it's hardly surprising that Dissidia beat Crisis Core's first week sales figures.
However, not only did it do that, but it's also continued to sell well since its release on the 14th of December. After just 3 weeks, it has already managed to sell 750,000 units, and it looks more than likely to overtake Crisis Core's lifetime Japanese sales of 790,000 next week; just a month after it was released.
It wouldn't be too much to suggest that Dissidia could well break the 1,000,000 units sold in Japan, and with the prospect of North America looming in Q2/Q3 of 2009 and Europe also on the cards at some point, Dissidia's sales could put it close to rivalling Monster Hunter Freedom 2nd G, on a worldwide scale.
Everyone had high expectations for Dissidia: Final Fantasy after all the hype its been receiving, and it appears to have delivered. Some thought it might actually break the one-day sales record, but it didn't quite meet that target as it managed to sell 350,000 units.
This amount of units sold matches that of Crisis Core, while it's still some way of short of the 670,000 that Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G managed when it was released. However, Crisis Core went on to sell almost 500,000 units in its opening week, so it'll be interesting to see how Dissidia performs.
It's also been reported that 40,000 of the units were obtained via sales of the Limited Edition PSP-3000 Bundle.