Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been enjoying a massive amount of attention since its release a few days ago. With much of the world now under quarantines (or at least practicing social distancing) there’s more people than ever with time to kill by playing video games.
It helps that, not counting the mobile game that Animal Crossing released, New Horizons is the first game in the franchise since New Leaf almost eight years ago. With the fanbase ready and waiting for a new game, this title was bound to sell plenty of copies.
But maybe it sold them faster than anyone expected. As of today, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold 1,880,626 retail copies just in Japan. This number includes several different versions of buying the game, including physical copies, download cards, and the hardware bundles that were on offer.
Interestingly, it doesn’t include digital sales, which would surely increase the numbers considerably. Plenty of players preordered the game on their Nintendo Switch so that they could have it preinstalled and ready to go right at midnight. This number also likely saw a good number of inflation due to the fact that the weeks leading up to the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons were filled with physical stores closing down amidst the growing COVID-19 pandemic. That said, Japan thankfully hasn’t been struck as hard with the COVID-19 virus, and they may not have closed down stores en masse as several other nations did.
Either way, this incredibly high number of sales in such a short time has sent it above plenty of other titles. New Horizons is the top-selling game on Amazon in the United States of all of 2020, as well as topping Doom Eternal, which was released on the same day. It also defeated Pokemon Sword & Shield for the release record, breaking the number by almost half a million retail copies.
While New Horizons has been extremely popular, it isn’t without flaws. Plenty of players have had highly negative reviews for the game’s somewhat directionless approach to the game’s objectives, while others have found the multiplayer to be unnecessarily limited to the point of nearly not working. Nintendo made the strange choice with this title to make it so that only one island could be created per Switch console, meaning that players sharing a console don’t get to have their own playthrough and must share their island – including all of its once-a-day resources – with the other players on their console.
