GearGames: Dragon Quest IX Sells 2.3 Million in 2 Days!
Posted on 14 July 2009, at 1:31 pm, by Michael Anderson
Let’s be honest … selling 2.3 million of ANYTHING in two days anywhere is bound to make someone very happy. In this case, the item in question is the video game Dragon Quest IX for the Nintendo DS, which was just released in Japan. The Dragon Quest series is EXTREMELY popular in Japan, and previous entries in the franchise have launched to furious sales. Dragon Quest VIII launched in 2004 for the Playstation 2 to 2.2 million sales in two days, and back in 1992 the Super Nintendo release of Dragon Quest V saw 1.5 million sales in two days.
A bit of history and context – the original Dragon Quest was released in Japan for the Nintendo NES system in 1986, predating the original Final Fantasy and based heavily on the American role-playing classics Wizardry and Ultima series. It established the core tenets of the so-called ‘jRPG’ (Japanese role-playing game) genre, and the series has been immensely popular in Japan ever since, second only to the Final Fantasy games also published by Square Enix. In North America the games were sold under the name Dragon Warrior until Dragon Quest VIII in 2005, and have never been nearly as popular as in Japan. For example, Dragon Quest VIII sold nearly 4 million copies in Japan, but barely surpasses 500,000 in North America.
While claims of selling loads of stuff are interesting for company execs and stockholders, what makes this interesting for gamers is that this is the FIRST major franchise release on a handheld platform. There are handheld-centric games such as the Pokemon franchise, but every other major release for a game franchise has happened on a home video game console, perhaps later ported to a handheld as was recently done with Dragon Quest IV and V arriving for the DS over the past year. Indeed, when Square Enix announced that they were releasing Dragon Quest IX on the DS there was a great deal of angst in the gaming community. Those concerns extended to potential loss of sales as some gamers claimed they would never play this sort of game on a handheld. These results show that those concerns were misplaced, as Dragon Quest IX had the biggest launch in franchise history and one of the biggest game launches ever.
No release date for anywhere outside of Japan has been announced as of yet.
Source: Yahoo! Tech News
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