Nintendo continues to put up impressive numbers for the Switch video game console as well as its hot game title, “Animal Crossing: New Horizons.”
For the quarter ending June 30, Nintendo sold 5.68 million Switch consoles, to bring total sales to a staggering 61.44 million in the three years since its release. The classic NES, released in 1983, sold 61.91 million units.
“Animal Crossing,” the popular animated community-based game that lets users build lives on islands with a virtual society, sold 10.63 million copies last quarter and has total sales of 22.4 million. The game is the second-best selling title of the year so far, behind “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.”
The game helped Nintendo reach software sales of 50.43 million for the quarter — more than double what the company recorded for the same period last year, Endgadget reported.
The sales buoy the ongoing notion that people forced to entertain themselves at home during the coronavirus pandemic are turning to video games, among other things. The NPD Group previously called “New Horizons” “the right game at the right time.” And in a recent study, NPD found that 35% of gamers report that their current play time during COVID-19 is higher than their play time from earlier in the year. Overall, 244 million people in the U.S. play video games, an increase of 32 million people since 2018, NPD found.
