Sales News – Killzone 2

In an interview with GameDaily, SCEA’s VP of Product Marketing, Scott Steinberg, revealed the following:

“Killzone 2 has been the fastest SCEA PS3 title to break the 500,000 unit mark and it’s also the highest selling SCEA PS3 title for the first 30 days out of launch,” detailed Steinberg. “So far, we are extremely happy with the results.”

The March NPD results should be released soon but this comment does tell us a little bit about what to expect for Killzone 2.

In the February NPD Killzone 2 was revealed to have sold 323,000 units in its first two days.  Assuming Steinberg is specifically referring to US sales above that would mean Killzone 2 has sold at least 177,000 in the US during March 2009, a figure almost certain to put it in the top twenty of the software chart, and likely also in the top ten (especially as sales would not have stopped at 500,000).

As for the game being the fastest SCEA title to reach 500,000 sales and the highest selling SCEA game in thirty days of sales, we have the following information to compare it to:

Resistance 2: 385,000 in first month (24 days of sales), 213,000 in second month.

LittleBigPlanet: 215,000 in first month (after a brief period of sales), 141,000 in second month, 255,000 in third month.

Finding figures for when other Sony games might have reached 500,000 is difficult, due to them disappearing from the charts before they reached that milestone.  That alone should imply that they did not sell quickly enough to compare to Killzone 2.

More than 500,000 sales in the first month is certainly a healthy figure for a PlayStation 3 exclusive, and it will be interesting to see whether we can expect similar figures consistently from Sony exclusives in the year ahead or if Killzone 2 just had that right combination of hype, strong marketing, critical acclaim and genre  to make it stand out.