Platinum Range (Best Selling PlayStation Games, PAL)

"The Platinum Range is a Sony PlayStation budget range in the PAL regions, notably Europe (including the United Kingdom and Ireland), Australia, New Zealand, India, and Africa.

Platinum Range titles are recognizable by a platinum/silver coloured band on the game's casing. This band runs along the top of the case's front. In old PlayStation 2 platinum games it is also common for the silver band to act as a border and to contain the game's original cover, which is shrunk to fill about 75% of the platinum cover. The PlayStation logo is repeated twice on the front case, once on the platinum border, and once on the original game's case. The new PlayStation 2 platinum games feature a new layout. They have a black border, and silver outlines around the shrunk original game cover. There is also a red orb located at the bottom of the original game cover with the words Platinum on it. The platinum band can also be seen on the manual. The Playstation 3 Platinum range box art replaces the black background of the Playstation 3 logo on the left with a yellow background, and has the original box art shrunk slightly, with a gray border, and a yellow rectangle on top of it, with 'Platinum' written in black.

PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 platinum game disks do not feature any of the original game disc's design, it is replaced with a simple silver design, which, along with the copyright notices around the edges, feature the game's name in the center surrounded by a black outline. PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 platinum games use the original games disc design.

To become a Platinum release it was required that a game have over 400,000 total worldwide sales after generally one year on the market[1] (PAL region sales in particular; games that sell over 400,000 units in another region alone, such as Japan or the U.S., do not necessarily qualify for a Platinum title).

For PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable releases, there is no specific target required to achieve Platinum status as indicated by SCEE Press Releases and the discrepancies between the Platinum status of specific titles and their chart performance.

After reaching the required level of sales, Sony often dropped the prices of the original title to Platinum pricing levels (generally about half of the original retail price), as a way to clear inventory for retailers.

The Platinum distinction has since been extended to the PSP and the PlayStation 3. The first PS3 titles were released on August 1, 2008.
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Source: Wikipedia, "Platinum_range", available under the CC-BY-SA License.