There'll be champagne corks popping at EA Sports this week as FIFA 13 booted itself into the record books with an astonishing launch.
The game shifted 4.5 million copies worldwide since its Friday release, enough to make it instantly top the charts in 40 countries. That includes the UK, of course, where it sold 1.23 million copies in just 48 hours. That's the biggest launch in UK games history, after the various Call of Duty sequels. To put it in perspective, that means on average over the weekend, seven copies of FIFA 13 were being sold in the UK every second.
The game crushed another record on Sunday, as 800,000 players settled in for online matches at the same time, the highest number of simultaneous players for any EA game ever. 66 million online multiplayer sessions have already been played, adding up to 600 million minutes of gaming. In other words, if you played all those matches one after another, it'd take over one thousand years.
It's well deserved too. FIFA 13 introduces a bunch of new features, including a deeper career mode that sees you managing international teams as well as local clubs. If you're hungry for more numbers, it boasts 31 leagues, 46 international teams and 69 real world stadiums.
FIFA 13 is, quite obviously, out now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Vita, PSP, and Nintendo 3DS. It'll be out for the Wii U as well, when that launches in November.