Animal Crossing: New Horizons best-selling game in Japan of all time

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold just under 3.9 million copies in Japan, making it the region’s best-selling Switch game of all time. The previous holder of this record was Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with 3.7 million copies sold.

This sales data comes courtesy of Famitsu, which also shows that Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the best-selling game of April 2020 in Japan. This is impressive considering the competition the game had, including Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which sold 839,000 copies for the month in Japan.

Thanks in part to the success of the game, Nintendo was the biggest selling publisher for the fifth consecutive month in the region. The company saw 1.5 million games sold, resulting in 9.25 billion yen ($86.4 million) in revenue. Animal Crossing: New Horizons accounted for four out of every five games sold for the month.

The Pokemon Company is listed separately from Nintendo in Japan. If their sales for the month, 68,207, are combined with Nintendo’s, the publisher’s total rises to over 2 million first-party games on the Switch sold in April 2020.

Square Enix was the second biggest-selling publisher of the month, shifting 1.03 million units. Both Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Trials of Mana served to boost units sold, with a total of 8.75 billion yen ($81.8 million) in revenue generated. This is the highest revenue generated for a second best-selling publisher in the region for the past five years.

Capcom was the third best-selling publisher for the month, though they were far behind both Nintendo and Square Enix with a total of just under 300,000 units sold. This was largely thanks to the launch of Resident Evil 3 Remake.

Overall for April 2020, Nintendo accounted for 38.7 percent of all games sold in the region, and Square Enix accounted for 36.6 percent.

In Japan last month a total of 3.6 million games were sold, down slightly from 4.5 million sold in March, but much larger than 1.3 million in February. It’s likely that March was boosted by the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons more than anything.

56.8 percent of all games sold in Japan for the month were on Nintendo Switch, just over 2 million. PlayStation 4 accounted for 42.4 percent of all games sold with 1.5 million units.

Even though there have been Switch hardware shortages in the region, 314,931 units were sold, accounting for 65 percent of all hardware sales for the month. The PlayStation 4 sold 166,150 units, and the PlayStation 4 Pro sold 50,000 units.

Physical game sales generated 37.1 billion yen for the month, which is up by 37.8 percent year-on-year. Software sales generated 23.9 billion yen ($223.3 million), up by 186 percent year-on-year, and hardware sales generated 13.2 billion yen ($123.3 million), up by 82.2 percent year-on-year.

The top ten best-selling games in Japan for April 2020 were as follows.