Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold an insane 13M copies in 6 weeks

Companies like Zoom and Amazon have enjoyed booming business amid the coronavirus lockdowns, but they’re not the only ones. Nintendo launched Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a flagship title for its Switch console, on March 20, just billions of people around the world were encouraged to stay home as much as possible. The result? A lot of bells for Nintendo.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold 13.41 million copies in the past 6 weeks, Nintendo revealed Thursday in a quarterly earnings report. New Horizons had sold over 11 million units by the end of March, the company noted. The Switch itself sold 21 million units over the past financial year, bringing its total to 55 million.

It may sound presumptuous to chalk up New Horizon’s success to global social distancing measures, but Nintendo itself noted that the game drastically outperformed previous titles. Both 2005 DS title Wide World and the 3DS’ New Leaf games sold around 2 million units in their first 6 weeks. 

New Horizons brings you to a deserted island, where you’ll work with entrepreneurial racoon Tom Nook to transform it into a paradise. It’s a calming life sim that has you fishing, catching bugs, digging for fossils, selling wares and making the island just the way you want it. 

Not only has New Horizon outperformed those games several times over, its 13 million in sales is already greater than the lifetime performance of both Wide World and New Leaf. It’s now the sixth best-selling Switch game of all time, behind Pokemon Sword and Shield’s 17 million. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe remains king of the hill at over 24 million sold. 

Nintendo’s earnings statement optimistically noted that “delays in production and shipping are gradually recovering” from the COVID-19 disruptions, but that game development may be a longer term issue. 

“If the effects of COVID-19 are prolonged or worsen further, development schedules may be impacted due to the difference in development environments between working from home and in the office. In particular, the impact to overseas subsidiaries and other affiliated companies involved in development is anticipated to be even more difficult to predict than within Japan,” the statement read. 

“As a result of these factors, we may not be able to proceed with the release of Nintendo products and the start of services as planned. This is also true for other software publishers, so it may not be possible to provide game content on Nintendo platforms as planned.”