Surprisingly absolutely no one, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still the best-selling video game in Japan for 2020 so far.

Yes, Animal Crossing is still wildly popular. The fastest-selling Nintendo Switch game of all time is also fast approaching the top five in terms of overall sales figures, and all this for a game that just released last March.

Oh, and it’s also still the best-selling Nintendo Switch game in Japan.

According to Famitsu, which just released its sales figures for the first half of 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 5,004,720 units in the first half of 2020 in Japan. Note that this number only counts physical sales and sales of digital download cards that you can buy in-store and not sales that were done entirely digitally.

This puts New Horizons far above the next best-selling game of 2020, Final Fantasy VII Remake, which sold just under a million copies, and well above Pokémon Sword & Shield, which sold 650,859 copies.

All of this continues the massive success story of Animal Crossing. The game came out at the perfect time when COVID-19 had just arrived in many Western countries and was causing government-mandated lockdowns. With nothing else to do, people turned to video games, and what better game to wait out the apocalypse than a chill game where you talk to friendly animals?

AC: New Horizons sold 1.8 million copies in its first week of sales in Japan and ran through 90% of its initial stock. May’s sales figures reported total sales of 13.41 million units worldwide, and there’s undoubtedly been many more millions sold since then.

New Horizons has gotten so popular that even celebrities are playing it. People held their graduations in Animal Crossing, while some people are even getting married there. It’s the virtual world that allows for some sense of normalcy in these very abnormal times. There’s even an Animal Crossing talk show where everyone shows up in their New Horizons avatars.

Will Animal Crossing: New Horizons go on to become the best game of 2020? Probably. And I’m fine with that.

Source: Famitsu, GamesIndustry.biz