Square Co, which develops games for Sony Corp, will ship 2 million copies of its latest entry in the best-selling Final Fantasy series, the largest-ever video-game release for the PlayStation2 console.
Square has asked Sony to speed up production of the game machine to increase the number of possible buyers able to play the fantasy role-playing game, Square president Hisashi Suzuki said in an interview. Final Fantasy X will be available only for PlayStation2.
Sony expects to sell 20 million of the consoles in the year ending March 31, a target likely to be met only if designers can make games enticing enough for players to buy the hardware on which they're played. Sony's Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc is producing a movie based loosely on Final Fantasy, in part to build on the game's popularity and boost software sales.
"The game may spur demand for PlayStation2 temporarily," said Masanobu Kuboi, an analyst with Ichiyoshi Research Institute.
"But 20 million is the upper limit of production capacity." Demand for PlayStation2 overseas still exceeds Sony's ability to build the game console.
Final Fantasy X will reach stores in Japan on July 19 this year, a week after the computer-animated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is released in theaters.
The joint release signals growing cooperation between the US$20-billion-a-year video-game industry and the movie business. Viacom Inc last month released Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie in the live-action movie based on the Tomb Raider video-game series from Eidos Plc.
A hit video game would help Sony by creating demand for the PlayStation2.
Sony last year failed to meet its initial 10-million unit sales target for the machine partly because players were unexcited by games designed for the box. Onimusha, a samurai-combat game, is one of the only PlayStation2 titles to sell more than a million units.
"Two million is a realistic number for an initial shipment target," Ichiyoshi Research's Kuboi said. "But given the number of PlayStation2s on the market now, it's a little ambitious."
The faster chip used in PlayStation2 to allow smoother, more realistic movements by game characters has raised the stakes for game software makers.
For developers like Square, budgets running to billions of yen step up the pressure to come up with big hits to cover ballooning development costs.
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