The Games News

The newest chapter of the Final Fantasy saga secures another first place in overall sales in Japan in traditional low-sales period.

Square Enix can boast about possibly the largest fanbase in the world, based mostly around the highly successfull (and addictive) Final Fantasy series, and to a lesser extent around the Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts series. And surely such a large crowd will buy your game if there is any “Final Fantasy” snippet in the title.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on the DS follows the successes of Final Fantasy Tactics PSP and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy PSP in May, and September respectively, debuting on the first place in the japanese sales charts at 142,000 units units. This is a commercial success, if you take into consideration the following games in the charts: #2 Ar Tonelico 2 for the PS2 and World Soccer Winning Eleven DS.

2K Games’ recent blockbuster at the top of the charts after just a month of its release.

Things are looking good for 2K Games(ex Irrational Games, creators of the critically acclaimed System Shock series) with their latest game release. Bioshock promised a lot through timed screens, tech trailers and the highly-acclaimed demo, and boy! did it deliver!

The facts (so far):

• nr.1 (360 version) and nr.4 (PC version) in Australia sales charts.
• nr.1 overall in British sales charts.
• an overall rating of 96/100 (!) at Metacritic (for those that don’t know it, Metacritic automatically calculates an average of the most important reviews on the web), based on 25 reviews.
• an impressive #1 in both “Top Rated” and “Best Sellers” categories on Steam (Valve’s electronic game distribution system, www.steampowered.com).

It is interesting to note that almost 88 percent of the entire sales have been achieved by the Xbox 360 version; this could mean, at least on a short term, a substantial increase in 360 sales. On a side note, this also reflects the rather poor state of the PC games market in view of the booming console market.

Personally, I think that Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament, Bungie’s Halo 3 or Blizzard’s Starcraft 2 (not likely to come out this year, but I believe in miracles), are the only games due this year that stand a chance of dethroning Bioshock in both sales and positive reviews, but in view or recent developments, they have a tough fight ahead of them.

Sony recently stated that the last shipments of the 60GB version of the PS3 have shipped to retailers

“We no longer have any inventory in SCEA warehouses. All inventory has been purchased and shipped to retailers.”, stated SCEA Senior Director of Corporate Communications Dave Karraker. This sales boom followed shortly after Sony’s announced price drop of 100 US dollars for the 60GB model just before this year’s E3. Moreover, after just one month of the announcement, the PS3 has outsold the Xbox360 by 2000 units in Canada in July for the first time, spiking from 98.000 units to 159.000 units.

How much of this could be considered good news? First of all, it is rumored that this is the only version that will have the Emotion Engine 2 hardware backward compatibility support. Second of all, Sony will promote its flagship version of the PS3, the one with 80 GB storage capacity that’s priced at 599 US Dollars. So, if you’re living in the US and want to get a 499 $ PS3 with full hardware backward compatibility for PS1 and PS2 games, visit your local retailer and maybe you will get one while stocks last.

Nintendo UK officials claim that the Wii is the fastest console ever to achieve over a million units sold in the UK.

The company quoted data acquired from Chart-Trak in stating that the Wii has passed the million mark in just thirty-eight weeks. Additional, non-public data from Chart-Trak also underlines the fact that the Wii has held a whooping 68 percent of the entire home console market in the UK, while its little brother, the Nintendo DS broke all records with a share of 86 percent of the handheld console market in the UK.

David Yarnton, Nintendo UK General Manager, has also stated that this is a testament to the accesibility and appeal of the Nintendo consoles, as even in traditional low videogames sales periods, the non-stop demand for the Wii helped achieve this record.

Comparing the Wii with its main competitors that have already passed that mark, the PS2 achieved 1 million units in fifty weeks, and the Xbox360 was even slower, reaching the milestone in sixty weeks.

Sony has recently unveiled its plan to release the new PlayStation 3. It is priced at a whopping $499 and $599 for the base and ramped-up versions of PlayStation 3 respectively. It is the price that is worrying both the gamers and critics alike. There is a serious concern that the price of the PlayStation 3 would be detrimental in the sales of the new console. It is widely said that the PlayStation 3 is the most advanced gaming console, but is it the most expensive too?

No, it is not, according to statistics, the console JDO, costing $700 was the costliest console ever. There can be two comparisons, one based on the actual cost and one based on the relative cost. In both the categories PlayStation 3 comes in the top five. The interesting thing to be noted here is all the high priced consoles have fared poorly in the market, in fact were big failures. All the high priced consoles, which included JDO, Neo Geo, CD1, and Saturn were good consoles but they lost out to their lower priced competitors. Experts say the same will not happen with PlayStation 3 because none of the high-priced consoles had a predecessor like the PlayStation 2.

What will happen to the high-priced PlayStation 3? Will it have the same fate as the other consoles or will PlayStation be an exception? We will have to wait and see.