Persona 5 has been a big hit for Atlus. Despite the crazy restrictive streaming rules they have setup, the company has managed to hit it off big in terms of reaching a wide audience. The game managed to ship a total of 1.5 million copies to PlayStation gamers around the world.

The news was originally posted up over on the official Persona Channel, where they made the announcement, essentially stating…

“Since launching last year [in Japan] on September 15th [2016], customers have graciously found Persona 5 to be favorable. Launching April 4th [2017] in North America and Europe has also resulted in happy days [for the company], with the worldwide shipping numbers totaling 1.5 million copies.”

This is a significant milestone for Atlus, and this means that they’re doing good business with Persona 5.

According to Gematsu 550,000 of those sales come from Japan alone. However, that figure counts the PS3 and PS4 versions of the game, where as the figure counting the European and North American versions is only for the PS4 version.

Now let’s get one thing clear here: shipping does not guarantee sell-through. A lot of games ship to retailers but they don’t always sell-through to customers. Oftentimes, though, shipments are based on pre-orders and typical pre-release demand, so if they’ve managed to move an additional million copies following the release in North America and Europe, then they obviously expected high demand.

This is actually surprisingly good news for Atlus because that’s actually just a million units shy of what Horizon: Zero Dawn did in two week’s time. So technically they’re doing quite well, so long as the marketing budget wasn’t too extreme and the development costs were kept in check.

If positive word of mouth and strong voluntary sales from a dedicated, grassroots community continue to propel the game’s momentum forward in the marketplace, then Atlus could have a real good smash hit on their hands for 2017.

According to the Persona Channel website, their next big development for the Persona series will be a live-concert set to take place at the Yokohama Arena later this year featuring performances based on the music featured int he game.