Playstation Gamer UK

Without argument the Nintendo Wii is dominating the mass market right now. Ever since it’s launch two and a half years ago it has been outselling it’s pseudo brother the PS3 and soon rocketed past it’s older cousin the Xbox 360. Almost reaching 50 million in just over two years the Wii is breaking all kinds of records. However, things are starting to slow down for the Wii and it’s interesting that it’s dominance over one market in particular seems to have come to an end… until the next Mario or Zelda game is launched at least.

Starting near the end of February the PS3 has been the top selling console (not including handhelds, since those are not consoles, they’re handhelds, duh) week by week in the Japanese market. Several games have contributed to this short term PS3 domination including Street Fighter IV, Yakuza III and Biohazard 5 (or Resident Evil 5 for you outside of Japan, actually I don’t know why they changed the name). However, it seems the impact those three games have paled in comparison to the impact had by last weeks big release.

If you’ve been living under a rock you probably don’t know what last week’s big release is, so I’ll inform you. Released in Japan last week on Blu-ray was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. Packaged with this blu-ray movie was a rather large demo for the big game of next year, Final Fantasy XIII. Due to the release of this bundle and a special limited edition black Cloud PS3, the PS3’s hardware sales damn near quadrupled that of the previous week. According to Japan’s own sales tracker, Media Create, the PS3’s sales went from roughly 16, 700 units in the week of April 6 to 12, to around 62, 500 units last week (April 13 to 19). That’s an increase of 45 000, and good for first among all platforms (handhelds included, yay, handhelds).

So what does this mean? Well it further helps support my point that there is, in fact, a world outside of North America and it creates interesting possibilities for when the game actually releases. It may be a multi-console game in most of the world but in Japan it’s still a PS3 exclusive. It actually shocks me to see how much impact a blu-ray/demo package can have on a system’s sales and I’ll be very interested to see this week’s numbers to see if the sales continue or drop back down to normal. Final Fantasy XIII itself will be launching sometime near the end of the year in Japan and next year in Europe and North America. Although I’m really more interested in Final Fantasy XIII Versus anyway.