Ace Combat Franchise Breaches 10 Million Sales Mark

Long-running arcade-style flight combat sim franchise Ace Combat has reached a worldwide sales milestone of 10 million copies, publisher Namco Bandai Games recently announced. The last PlayStation 2 entry in the series, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, was said to have sold over one million units in North America. Since the Namco-developed series' inception in 1995, Ace Combat has been largely exclusive to PlayStation platforms, with few exceptions. In 2005, Ace Combat Advance was released for Game Boy Advance, and last year Namco Bandai published the most recent game in the series, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, for Xbox 360. Despite the continued strength of Ace Combat, the combat flight sim genre has greatly waned since its broader success in the 1990s, when it was more common on the PC platform. Ubisoft recently announced its intention to break into the segment with Ubisoft Romania's Tom Clancy's HAWX for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.