The Shrine

For about 20 years now, Pokemon games have repeatedly enjoyed the status of the fastest selling Nintendo game of all time. Pokemon Sword and Shield is the latest to top the record, exceeding 6 million sales in its first weekend of release making it the fastest selling Nintendo game of all time and the fastest selling game of the generation, so far.

While, unconfirmed, initial sales reports from Japan and the UK suggest Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s sales are staggering.

Sales data from Japan has revealed that Animal Crossing New Horizons is now the fastest selling game of all time in that market, exceeding 2.5 million sales for the weekend. On the other side of the world in the United Kingdom, Animal Crossing topped the charts - although no numbers were revealed other than it outsold the previous game’s franchise record by 3.5 times - which means it’s outsold the rest of the franchise combined by more than double for that time. Considering North America and Europe are traditionally larger markets for Animal Crossing (previous games selling as much as 5 times higher in North America than Japan), it suggests that Pokémon’s record has likely been obliterated. So, at the very least, I’m jumping the gun to suggest the record is at least broken.

Sales estimates for the Switch last week put it at 840,000 units worldwide. or holiday season numbers.

Anyway, the game is a lot of fun. I’ve been a big fan since the GameCube era during my University days. It’s a social simulator/casual game - so you’d expect people logging in, doing their stuff for 3-15 minutes then logging out. But while I was in University, I had a bunch of people crashing at my place all the time, old friends travelling the world, looking for places to stay, random women who I met through school, or at a party, or out on the town. They would put on Animal Crossing and play the shit out of it. And the GameCube version of it was extremely basic compared to later versions; but at the time there wasn’t really anything like it.

Long after I stopped playing, others kept playing it. It was basically the only thing my GameCube got used for except for 007 games, Def Jam Vendetta, and Skies of Arcadia Legends (my Mario Kart and some trash games got stolen, I didn’t miss it as long as I had Mario Kart 64 and SNES). While GameCube is probably the Nintendo console I played the least, it did have its shining gems, and Animal Crossing was the brightest.

Then, when I was a little older and other Animal Crossing games came out, I began connecting with my younger half sisters, and they began connecting with each other over Animal Crossing (my dad... let’s just say he’s sown more than his share of wild oats). So the series means a lot to me. This one is easily the best quality of the bunch; not only does it heavily expand on its traditional features, but it has also added in some sandbox play: you can landscape your island into all sorts of different things.

The game, as always, is not for everyone; there’s no killing or anything like that in it. On the other hand, it’s relaxing and calming, and has grown extremely popular over the generations. Maybe this will be the next Nintendo franchise to breach 20,000,000? It’ll be that one or Breath of the Wild - which is getting very close (around 17 million, 19 million if you include Wii U sales).

Second week reports are in, and Switch again, at about 570,000 units, had one of the all time highest sales for a week in March of any dedicated video gaming system.

In my opinion, Animal Crossing New Horizons is the second landmark experience to come to the Switch, the first being Breath of the Wild.

Thus far (aside from the Easter event shenanigans, where eggs started spawning all over the place so the player can craft 37 different Easter items), the game is a big step above previous entries. It’s probably the Mario Kart Wii of the AC series. When I say that, I’m not saying the previous Kart games were bad, some people swear on Mario Kart 64, and for some perplexing reason Double Dash has a fan base, and DS was the first major sales breakthrough, but Mario Kart Wii is, IMO, the first of the modern Mario Kart games. It’s solid all the way through, fun, and a base for all of the new games that followed, each one more advanced and better than the last. I can see New Horizons leaning far more heavily into the sandbox genre while maintaining its casual and social simulator elements is the foundation of many AC games to come.

Today I heard that Animal Crossing got banned in China:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... est-ground

There was some random Chinese mobile game I was playing where they banned players and guilds with the word Hong Kong in their name.

Did some more research and it's hard to verify because the Chinese way seems to be that the game never existed one way or another because technically it's not supposed to be sold there, though Animal Crossing seems to be less in existence compared to before.

Considering all the people in lockdown all over the world, combined with easy access to digital content, and considering the IP popularity - this was a perfect storm for Animal Crossing to make a ton of dough.

Yeah, there's a lot of social activity going on in the Animal Crossing community. The game is a sandbox of sorts, and so there's a lot of emergent gameplay and socializing. Professional designers are spending hundreds of hours on it to form these massive island-wide resorts. Economists are practicing efficient ways of generating income. And people are doing all sorts of weird things from setting up hide'n'seek tournaments, to occultism, and even Animal Crossing dates.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake managed to get to the top spot for a week, but Animal Crossing took it right back the next week. With the whole China thing, it really has become some sort of cultural phenomenon: Covid in the west, in China the Hong Kong movement, and in Japan... well, Japan is Japan - they're always going to enjoy games like that.

For a few more sales tidbits: Animal Crossing sold 5 million units, digitally, in the month of March according to a research group (not Nintendo's official numbers, those are still a week away); but it suggests that Animal Crossing has set a new world record for digital game sales for a single month.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold more digital units in a single month (5.0M) than any console game in history. The Nintendo-published title broke the console record for monthly digital game sales previously held by Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. Animal Crossing: New Horizons also roughly matched the first-month digital sales of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokémon Sword and Shield put together. The game’s combination of social features and a relaxing setting likely appealed to individuals stuck at home. Closures of brick and mortar stores also meant that a higher share of consumers purchased the game digitally compared to past Switch titles.

https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/ ... mes-market

Total physical copies in Japan have exceeded the total physical copy sales of Pokemon S&S and Smash Bros Ultimate.

Nintendo has their annual fiscal Q4 (Jan-Mar) and year end report coming up at the end of April. We'll hear more about the first 10 days of sales, worldwide, then. April had a ton of sales too, but it's not likely Nintendo will cover those until their Q1 report at the end of July.

At 11.77 million units, nearly double that of Pokemon Sword and Shield's record breaking first week for Nintendo, and the fastest selling game on a single platform in the history of video games, and the second fastest selling game of all time. Grand Theft Auto 5 is the only game that sold more overall in its first week at 12 million (11.21 million in the first day), although, that was on two platforms.

Animal Crossing games in the past have been somewhat evergreen sleeper hit, that is, they usually launch with little sales success but build up to high levels over time (as opposed to a sleeper hit, like Just Dance, that launches to very poor initial sales, but then becomes a major hit at a later date - Just Dance, for example, sold about 6,000 units its first week, but 1 year later it was selling 200,000 a week). For comparison's sake, Animal Crossing New Leaf sold 2.2M during its first 3 months, eventually going on to sell 11 million.

Update: 10.6 million more units sold for the spring quarter bringing the total up to 22.4 million units. These are KILLER numbers.

For comparison’s sake, Pokémon Red/Blue/Green, released in 1996, sold 31.38 million units, lifetime. The second highest is Gold and Silver, released 1999, with 23.1 million, and the third highest is Sword and Shield, released 2019, which has sold 19.99 million so far.

Animal Crossing has now sold 31.18 million, nuking the sales record. It's the highest selling retail level game for any calendar year in history by nearly double, exceeding GTA5's sales of just over 16 million on PS3.

It's already one of the top 10 highest selling retail level dedicated console games in history (not including ports) and has an excellent shot at hitting #1 (Mario Kart Wii, at just over 37 million).

An update: Animal Crossing has sold 42.21 million as of the end of the last fiscal year. It would be the #1 game were it not for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which has sold 53.79 million copies on Switch. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is also the most heavily supported game Nintendo has ever had post-launch with DLC still coming out for it.