Square Enix Ships 5 Million FFXIII Copies

Though Final Fantasy XIII didn't release in the West until this week, Square Enix has already shipped five million copies of the highly anticipated RPG worldwide. The publisher shipped three million of the game's PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 copies to North America, Europe, and Australia. In Japan, where Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIII last December exclusively for PS3, the company shipped 1.8 million copies for the RPG's launch. Square Enix didn't indicate how many of those five million units it's actually sold at stores, but Japan reportedly moved nearly 1.7 million PS3 copies of Final Fantasy XIII by the end of 2009, according to a report from Famitsu publisher Enterbrain. Despite releasing at the end of the year, it was the fifth top-selling game of 2009 in the country. The company also revealed that with its Final Fantasy XIII shipments, it has now shipped 96 million copies of games from the Final Fantasy series since its debut on the NES/Famicom in 1987. For comparison, Dragon Quest, Square Enix's other hugely popular (in Japan at least) RPG series, has shipped only 53 million units worldwide.