8 out of 10 Nordic PS3 users online

via Games Industry


Sweden and Iceland are leading the uptake of online services for the PlayStation 3 in Europe, with eight out of ten PS3 consumers signing up for Sony's service, according to data from Dataspelsbranschen.

At Game Convention in Germany last month, David Reeves said that the average uptake of the PlayStation Network was just under 5 out of every 10 users, with 645,000 of the 1.3 million consoles sold in Europe registered for the service.

And according to Nordisk Film Interactive, the official distributor of PlayStation products in the Nordic region, sales of the console have been "incredible" since the recent introduction of Starter Pack bundles.

"Since we launched the Starter pack with a PlayStation 3, two games and two controllers in the middle of June the sales have been incredible," offered Jens Alex, MD of Nordisk Film.

"Another force is online which Sony has been criticised for, but we managed to overcome the expectations. Sweden has the highest number of PlayStation 3's online in Europe in comparison to the size of the country," he said.

Dataspelsbranschen has also revealed software sales figures for Sweden for the first six months of the year, showing that the PC is still the most popular platform, with 1.3 million games sold accounting for EUR 21.1 million.

The PlayStation 2 is still the most popular console, generating EUR 18.2 million in software sales for the first six months of 2007, or 530,819 units.

Software for Microsoft's Xbox 360 is still selling strong in the region, with 146,273 units generating sales of EUR 6.2 million.

PlayStation 3 software has sold just over 93,000 units or EUR 5.4 million, while Wii titles have moved over 82,000 units or EUR 4.1 million.

In the battle of the handhelds, 173,103 games have been sold for the Nintendo DS, generating EUR 5.7 million, and 76,113 titles have been sold for the PSP, making EUR 1.5 million.

Total software sales on all formats in Sweden during the first six months reached EUR 64.3 million, with the market expected to grow 20 per cent during 2007.