Animal Crossing has sold nearly 1 million copies a week since launch

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a sales revenue beast that has moved nearly 1 million copies every week since its release in March 2020.

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The newest Animal Crossing game on Switch has broken multiple records for Nintendo. The game moved an astronomical 11.77 million copies in just 11 days on the market--more than some games sell in their entire lifetime. In the next quarter, Q1 of FY2021, New Horizons pushed another 10.63 million copies sold. Now the game is finally slowing down, but sales haven't dried up just yet.

As of Fiscal Year Q2'21, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold 26.04 million copies since launch. The cute-and-fuzzy sim is now the second best-selling Switch game of all time despite only being available for a fraction of the system's total lifespan.

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To put this into perspective, I've collected all of the Switch's top 10 best-selling games and compared total sales vs. weeks on the market. The results really underline just how big Animal Crossing really is. The game amassed that record-breaking 26 million sales in just 27 weeks on the market, meaning AC: NH moved nearly 1 million units per week since its original launch.

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Conversely, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe took 177 weeks to dominate the charts with 28.99 million game sales.

Despite the massive sales surge, Animal Crossing is starting to cool off. Quarter-by-quarter sales of the game were only up 3.62 million units. This was still the largest incremental sales gain in Q2.

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The Switch's other software metrics are likewise as impressive. The Switch has sold over 456 million copies of games across a library of 710 titles, making it the #5 best-selling software platform in Nintendo history.

The company expects Switch software to hit 535.4 million by March 2021, which would beat both NES and Game Boy lifetime game sales. Games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons will ensure this target is met.

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More on Nintendo's Fiscal Year Q2 2021 performance:

• Switch sales skyrocket to record Q2 high of 6.86 million
• Switch game sales hit 456 million, will dethrone NES, Game Boy in 2021
• Nintendo significantly raises FY2021 forecast on Q1-Q2 earnings surge