Jesus Christ, why won’t people shut up about Killzone 2 sales already. I have read a handful of articles about Killzone 2 sales over the past week at various sites like Joystiq, Kotaku, and Gamasutra. Basically, two things happened with Killzone 2 sales. The first being that it sold over 500k units in the US in the first two months of release, which is the fastest selling first party title on the PS3. The second thing being that it sold over 1 million units worldwide in the same time period These number are according to NPD charts from February and March.

Why is everybody talking about this in such a positive fashion? And why does Sony seem to think these are great numbers? And why is the video game media eating their bullshit right up? 1 million sales in two months WORLDWIDE is NOT good, especially when Sony has been marketing this game for 3 years and has been talking about how its going to be the best game EVAR and will be the reason people buy a PS3 and all of that bullshit. Allow me to throw out some sales figures of other games to compare to Killzone 2.

Gears of War sold over 500K copies in the first week in the US alone, and about 900K worldwide. BioShock hit the 500K mark after the second week in the US. Mass Effect was over the 1 million mark worldwide after 2 months as did Left 4 Dead. And those numbers are the sales on the Xbox 360 only. All of the games I have just mentioned are original IP games that don’t come from any established franchise. It would be unfair to compare the 5.5 million copies that Halo 3 sold worldwide in its first two months to Killzone 2.

The fact of the matter is that Killzone 2 sold much worse than Sony would have liked, but they can’t admit that publicly. It is a game that has been in development for at least 5 years now and who knows how much money it has cost them. Killzone 2 illustrates why the PS3 is a system that has been setup for failure from the very start. It starts with the overpriced hardware that has been losing Sony money, but that isn’t the most important part. Microsoft lost money on hardware manufacturing as well, but that doesn’t matter. All three major companies don’t make their money in the console, they make it in software and accessory sales.

Nintendo has done well with the Wii and its accessories. I don’t know how they convince consumers to buy worthless controller attachments that cost pennies to make but sell for $20, but they do. Microsoft has really done something incredible with their platform though. Since the launch of LIVE on the original Xbox, it has been working towards building its empire to the state it is in today. You can see early on with Halo 2 exactly what Microsoft’s plan is. There is always going to be an audience that is willing to pay for some extra content. Whether it be additional songs, maps, or quests, people will pay for them.

Over 40 million songs have been downloaded from the Rock Band music store (I would assume that is between 360 and PS3 sales). I don’t have a clue how many people buy the Halo 3 map packs, but even if only 10% of people that own Halo 3 buy the map pack, that is still 500K people, the same amount of people that own Killzone 2 in the US.

When looking at just software sales, Sony loses out to Microsoft big time in that department. Sony has 30 titles on the PS3 that have sold over 1 million worldwide, 10 of them being PS3 exclusive. Microsoft on the other hand has 62 titles on the Xbox 360 that have hit the 1 million mark worldwide, 19 of which are exclusive. And when I use the term “exclusive”, I am comparing between the Xbox 360 and PS3 systems only for the sake of this article

The point that I am trying to make here is that both Nintendo and Microsoft know excatly what they are doing, and they have a plan for the future and seem to know how to make money. But, it seems that Sony is just lost in the void of the videogame world and doesn’t have a clue what is going on. Sony used to be the untouchable dominant force with the PlayStation and even moreso with the PS2, but they have now become the old company, content with their previous success and have failed to do anything new. I don’t know what they could possibly have planned for the future, but they better figure it out quick if they want to stay relevant in the videogame world.

But I think the thing that has annoyed me the most about reading these articles is the attention and praise that all of the videogame news sites have given to Killzone 2 sales. I mean, I expect Sony to bullshit all day long about how great they are and they have to spin news in a way to make themselves look better. But it disappoints and irritates me that nobody in the videogame press world have called them out on their shenanigans.

*as you may have noticed by now I am using VGChartz for my sales figures. While they may not be exactly accurate, they are accurate enough for quick reference and for the arguments that I am making.