Animal Crossing New Horizons has now sold more than 30 million copies in less than 40 weeks on the market. It could soon become the top-selling game on the Switch.
Ever since we started charting Nintendo's top 10 game sales since Q4'20, we've seen multiple Switch games slowly taper off. Everything changed when Animal Crossing New Horizons exploded onto the platform in 2020. Since then, Animal Crossing has sold nearly 1 million copies every week since launch, and has slightly slowed down throughout the year.
How to read the chart: The blue is game sales in millions, the orange is weeks on the market. The closer the two bars are to one another, the better the game has consistently sold.
Right now, Animal Crossing is the second best-selling game on the Switch, second only to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Within just 40 weeks on the market, Animal Crossing has amassed a staggering 31.18 million copies sold on the Switch. A quick bit of math shows that nearly 40% of all Switch owners have purchased Animal Crossing. For comparison's sake, it's taken Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 190 weeks to claim the Switch's software throne with 33.41 million copies.
Current trends show Animal Crossing could easily become the Switch's best-selling game by March 2021. In the four quarters since launch, Animal Crossing's sales trends look like this:
- Q4'20 - 11.77 million
- Q1'21 - 10.53 million
- Q2'21 - 3.64 million
- Q3'21 - 5.14 million
The game may slow down in Q4, which isn't a surprise as most game sales cool off after the holiday blitz. But coronavirus quarantines have redefined the rules as to what's possible in the games industry and we're current in unprecedented and uncharted waters, so all bets are off.
Animal Crossing should indeed become the best-selling game on Switch in the FY2021 period.
