Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Biggest Switch Launch Ever In Japan
As with many Nintendo Switch owners out there, I’ve been busy playing way too much Animal Crossing: New Horizons over the past five days. The game has some seriously addicting qualities to it, and with many states in a lockdown it’s the perfect time for that island getaway.
Our friends across the Pacific are also buying up the game in droves. Japanese sales results, courtesy of Famitsu and ResetEra, show Animal Crossing: New Horizons is now the fastest selling Switch game of all time in that country. 1,880,626 physical games were sold between March 20 – 22. Given that this game in particular has a certain appeal for digital sales, since many gamers will likely want to check in on a daily basis, it’s safe to assume the title is well over 2 million sold in that country alone.
Equally impressive are the hardware sales for the week for the Nintendo Switch in Japan. 392,576 were sold from March 16 – 22, of which 263,103 were Lites. Sales of the system completely obliterated the prior week’s total of 57,274 Switches sold as well as last year’s sales of 56,812. For 2020 the Switch is ahead of 2019’s Switch sales with 1,417,791 sold so far this year versus 919,371 last year.
Normally we’d have to wait for the NPD to report monthly sales in the U.S. market, but if history holds we won’t be surprised if Nintendo makes an official announcement about sales data in the next few days. Anecdotal evidence suggests the game has been just as big of a hit, if not bigger, over here. It topped the charts in the UK as well.
One other interesting factoid is that the Switch’s life-to-date sales in Japan have reached 12,801,222. Why is that noteworthy? Well, the system has now outsold the Wii in Japan, and it only took three years to do it! It’s far from doing so worldwide (and it may never do so), but at least for that one territory the Switch is a massive success.
[Source: ResetEra]
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
