The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more gamers into their homes and in front of their systems than ever before, which has done wonders for the sales of games around the world. Nintendo especially has had a wonderful bit of surge in their sales, with the social distancing beginning close to when their highly-anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons was set to launch.
In the gaming community, we watched Nintendo Switches fly off the shelf en masse. Some were even selling theirs at a considerable mark up online as Switches became a hot commodity, a shortage of them leaving shelves completely empty as gamers either paid a higher premium or were simply made to go without.
The hype around Animal Crossing: New Horizons certainly isn’t the only factor that played into this – but it might be the biggest factor. As of their report’s publication, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold 11.77 million units, an incredibly high number in an extremely short amount of time.
This report considers the fiscal year for Nintendo, which means that it cuts off at the end of March 31st, 2020. Knowing this is the timeframe, it only makes the massive sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons more impressive, as the title was only released on March 20th.
That means that Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold their millions and millions of copies in only eleven days. That puts the daily average at more than a million units sold every day. As of writing this, the sales are now well over 13 million, helping to push the title closer and closer to the sales of massive Nintendo blockbusters like Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The title has already surpassed quite a few other hits, such as Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Party.
Again, so much of this might be due to the COVID-19 pandemic that forced us all to remain indoors and find something else to pass the time. The sale of Switches themselves is just as impressive as the sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with more than 21 million Switches being sold, when the base Switch and LITE Switch sales are combined. All of this comes together to put Nintendo at a massive profit over last year, with a roughly 33% increase in net profit.
As the social distancing continues on and the pandemic continues to affect our lives, there’s a good chance that we’ll only see numbers such as these continue to increase.
