Dragon Quest IX in Japan
The ninth installment in the Dragon Quest series was released yesterday in Japan, and it is very plausible that it sets a new record for weekly Japanese sales, beating Final Fantasy VIII in 1999 with sales of about 2.6 million in it’s first week.
Square-Enix shipped 3 million units just for day one, and over two million copies were pre-ordered before release. It has been estimated that 2.8 million copies have already sold through, and if that is the case, then the weekly record has been beaten, after a decade with the title belonging to Square-Enix’s own Final Fantasy VIII.
If you check out videos on YouTube, you can see the excitement in Japan, as it was a huge day for gaming, and came unexpectedly as the country has been in a gaming recession for quite some time. Is this what Japan needed to kick them back into gaming gear? Monster Hunter is launching for Wii on August 1, and Wii Sports Resort was launched a few weeks back. With all these titles coming one after another, Nintendo is seeing large boosts in hardware, and cementing their number one position, ensuring that they will not be beaten this generation by either Sony or (laugh) Microsoft.
While handheld sales are fairly strong in Japan, console sales have been doing awful, with the Wii selling an average of 15,000 on a weekly basis for the past couple months (beating the PS3 at 10,000 and the 360 at 4,000). The past few weeks saw increases with the release of Wii Sports Resort, which pushed Wii hardware to 23,000 last week. With Monster Hunter launching as a bundle with the console, it will be interesting to see how much it affects hardware sales, and if the Wii can finally start outputting normal hardware levels of 60,000 each week.
I’ll keep you updated.