Persona 4 storms the charts!

With a huge existing PS2 user base and a great following for the series, I guess Persona 4 (released in Japan on 10th July, hitting US shores 9th December) was always going to do ‘well’ upon release. Now though, we know exactly how well thanks to Media Create’s sales rankings for July 7th-July 13th. It’s kinda surprising in that ‘Yay!’ kinda way .

According to an article on Wired’s Game Life website, Persona 4 tops the charts with 193,000 sales! Even second place, Nintendo’s powerhorse ‘Wii Fit’, is only trundling along steadily (adding to it’s albeit still impressive existing 2,353,000 sales) with a much smaller 30,000 untis. The next ‘new’ release that week comes from ‘Densetsu no Stafy Taiketsu! Dire Kaizokudan’ on the Nintendo DS, clocking in at number 3 with only 29,000 sales. 193,000 sales?! I’m sure Atlus must be feeling all smug right about now (how about a celebratory European release date announcement, eh? No? Okay… maybe another time *bah*).

It makes me happy that the PS2 is still managing to command such a healthy share of the market but should we really be surprised? According to this article from Kotaku covering hardware sales for the same week, the PS2 is only trailing the PS3 by just over 2000 sales. In this age where some console manufacturers are eager to push us all into the next generation of hardware at the earliest opportunity possible, I’m glad to see that the old PS2 can kick ass/take names show the big boys that it’s still far from dead.

By the way, apologies for the link-fest in this post. Got a little carried away.