Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Already Surpassed Nintendo's Expectations

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This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

We reported last week that Animal Crossing: New Horizons had sold like gangbusters, with Nintendo’s end-of-year financial briefing revealing that it had shifted 13.4 million copies within it’s first six weeks on sale.

That level of success even surprised Nintendo, with the company apparently hoping the game would hit those numbers in it’s lifetime, never mind in less than a couple of months.

The Investor Q&A that accompanies the briefing hasn’t had the English version released yet, but Nintendo Everything have translated part of the Japanese version to reveal Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa’s surprise at the game’s success:

“The initial sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons have greatly exceeded our expectations. We were targeting the current sales numbers for the game’s lifetime considering fans have been waiting such a long time for this game, but it all happened at a much faster rate than we anticipated.”

It appears that many fans have opted for the digital version of the game too, with Furukawa stating that “about 50%” of those 13 million copies have been downloaded from the eShop. Given the nature of the game - one you tend to drop into every day - that makes a lot of sense.

The game is already the seventh best-selling game on the Switch, so it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of lifetime numbers it actually does.

Did you go digital or physical for Animal Crossing? Let us know down in the comments!