Animal Crossing: New Horizons Sales Are Off To An Incredible Start

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold incredibly well in its first weeks on the market, with Nintendo announcing that the island-designing sequel averaged selling more than a million copies a day from launch until March 31.

In Nintendo's financial earnings release, the company disclosed that worldwide sales for Animal Crossing: New Horizons have surpassed 13.41 million copies, with 11.77 million of those occurring between its March 20 launch and the closing of Nintendo's FY2020 earnings on March 31. The figures are a combination of physical and digital units.

The figure helped boost Nintendo's overall software and hardware sales for the entire financial year. Between the beginning of April 2019 and the end of March 2020, Nintendo sold through 21.03 million Switch consoles (a combination of regular Switch units and the Switch Lite), an increase of 24% on the previous year. Software sales grew even more, with 168.72 million units sold in the same period--a 42.3% increase year-on-year.

In the Q&A session following the report, it was revealed that 40% of Animal Crossing: New Horizon players were between the ages of 20 and 30, and that 40% of players were female. A large number of New Horizon players also purchased new Switch hardware for the title. In comparison to other Animal Crossing titles, the first six weeks of New Horizons sales put it ahead of lifetime sales for both Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the Nintendo 3DS, and Animal Crossing: Wild World on the Nintendo DS.

It's not difficult to see why Animal Crossing: New Horizons is selling so well. Our 9/10 review for New Horizons praised the game's improvements and breadth of daily activities to complete, with critic Kallie Plagge writing, "New Horizons certainly came at the right time, and its strengths are particularly comforting right now. I'm as excited to see what random events await me each morning as I am glad to have it during hard times, and that's sure to keep me coming back for the foreseeable future."