Animal Crossing New Horizons has been selling rather well, and now that Nintendo has put out official numbers, we can say exactly how well - 11.77m in its first 11 days and going on to sell 13.41m in its first 6 weeks. This is not only franchise record-breaking, but according to Nintendo, it's the fastest-selling Switch launch so far. But there's been some murmurings on social media since the game's launch that this is just another example of 2020 being weird, that it's the perfect game for a distinctly imperfect time, and that the quirky Nintendo series about paying off debts by catching bugs just got really lucky with its launch timing. After all, gaming, in general, is winning from the current mess due to people looking for things to do while stuck inside, and it's very easy to whittle away a couple of hours at a time playing Animal Crossing for weeks, if not years, as you build it into your general routine. In general, when a Nintendo IP game launches on Switch, it does a couple of million units better than it had done at least in recent releases. For whatever reason, demand for Nintendo games seems a little higher than on prior Nintendo systems, both handheld and console, both successful and the Wii U. When a series is stable that seems to generally result in the best sales for a decade or two. But... Animal Crossing didn't exactly have stable sales figures - They were showing signs of growth. Using Nintendo's IR headline figures, and the VGSales Wiki for titles in the franchise outside of the top ten on their respective systems, the Gamecube instalment sold over 2m, though the number doesn't seem to include figures for outside of the US and Japan. The sort of numbers that Nintendo has a suite of regular, recurrent, series that they put out relatively small games to. The second game in the series, Wild World, meanwhile? Sales jumped to 11.75m. The second (or third. The original game in the franchise had a complicated release history) console animal crossing game, City Folk/Let's Go To The City? Sold 4.32m on the Wii, while the latest mainline Animal Crossing title sold 12.55m on the 3ds. To quickly summarize that: Console Animal Crossing went from 2.32m to 4.32m, albeit the larger number was on a far more successful console. Handheld Animal Crossing went around from around 11.75m to 12.55m, but on a system that sold about half as well as the system the other handheld released on. The Switch, as a hybrid system, tends to see games sell a bit better than they tend to on their most successful system form factor. Breath of the wild sold a bit better than you typically expect a Zelda game to sell on a console, Sword and Shield sold a bit better than new-gen Pokemon has typically been selling since Gen III. What's different this time is the pace of sales. While most games tend to sell more at launch than any other period, I was expecting slower sales for Animal Crossing than is typical for the games industry - New Leaf was still selling enough to be noticeable after the launch of the Switch, I remember it being half a million behind Wild World, rather than three-quarters of a million ahead - but given how most games sell on Switch compared to elsewhere, and Animal Crossing's handheld performance? I was always expecting that when the dust settled Animal Crossing should be looking at a minimum of 13m, with 14-15m being more likely, and having nearly reached that band in 6 weeks? I think I underestimated. This is always the sort of numbers we should have been expecting New Horizons to put out... Even if past franchise precedent would lead us to expect it to reach them in a matter of years rather than weeks, and it will be interesting to see if the franchise has started to sell like a normal game (or even a normal Nintendo game) rather than the slow and steady sales figures New Leaf had, or if it will still have the ludicrously long tail that Animal Crossing has had previously on top of this steller launch.
- Stephen