Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Japan’s best selling game of the year so far, selling over 5m units

A new list of the best-selling games in Japan for 2020 has been released, showing Animal Crossing’s dominance of the market there. The game has sold over 5 million units in Japan, making it the best-selling game of the year so far.

This comes via data released by Famitsu (thanks GI.biz), which features the sales figures for the first half of 2020, and shows that Animal Crossing has five times the amount of sales as the second place entry, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which sold estimated 931,165 copies.

It is worth noting that Famitsu’s data does not include digital sales, only taking physical sales into account, and so the actual sales figures are likely to be much higher.

Animal Crossing has performed incredibly well following its release in March this year. The game surpassed its lifetime sales expectations in just two months, and is Japan’s biggest Switch launch ever.

Despite the COVID-19 outbreak affecting the production of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Switch bundle, it seems likely that the game has benefitted from the surge in gaming brought on by the COVID-19 lockdown measures, particularly given its release date in March – around the time many Western countries went into lockdown.

Famitsu also released the sales figures for consoles, with the Switch in first with 2.6 million units sold, bringing the console’s lifetime sales in Japan to over 14 million units. In the same period, the Playstation 4 sold 435,812 units (lifetime sales 9.2 million) , while the Xbox One sold just 2,685 units (lifetime sales 113, 931) – with the Xbox One being outsold by the Nintendo 3DS, which sold 33,000 units, with lifetime sales of 24.5 million. These figures include all the console variants, such as the Switch Lite and the PS4 Pro.

According to Famitsu, consumers spent ¥95.47 billion on software and  ¥79.3 billion on hardware, coming to a combined  ¥174.8 billion spent on games retail in H1 2020.

The top selling games in Japan for H1 2020 are as follows.

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizon (Switch / Nintendo) – 5,004,720 units
2. Final Fantasy 7 Remake (PS4 / Square Enix) – 931,165
3. Pokémon Sword & Shield (Switch / The Pokémon Company) – 650,859
4. Ring Fit Adventure (Switch / Nintendo) – 577,875
5. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch / Nintendo) – 346,034
6. Super Smash Bros Ultimate (Switch / Nintendo) – 284,717
7. Minecraft (Switch / Microsoft) – 280,662
8. Resident Evil 3 Remake (PS4 / Capcom) – 263,625
9. Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon Rescue Team DX (Switch / The Pokémon Company) – 260,802
10. Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon (PS4 / Sega) – 259,580