Pokemon Red/Blue/Green, Super Mario Bros, New Super Mario Bros, Pokemon Gold/Silver, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, Pokemon Black/White, Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire and Animal Crossing: Wild World are the rest of the games in the top 10.
If we combine Pokemon Red/Blue/Green with Pokemon Yellow that would bring the top-selling game of all time with over 12M. I think that New Horizon might actually top this lifetime. Since I don't think sales will fall off a cliff after 2020 but we might need to combine shipped+digital to get to this type of unprecedented amount. The main thing New Horizon has going for it compared to past games is future DLC and Expansions which should help it chug along the next few years. I don't think the game will have much difficulty to sell 1M units in 2021, taking it to 9-10M physical by the end of next year. Shipp+digital it could hit 12M sometime in 2022-2023.
So yeah no matter what you view as the top-selling game of Japan of all time eventually New Horizon will get there. Switch is actually proving that by combining their software output Nintendo is able to make a high priced device sell on par with handhelds. It's not yet at DS levels but at some point, the Switch will become accessible in terms of pricing, so it's actually easily going to surpass 3DS lifetime sales. People tend to forget that initially, 3DS wasn't selling so well, but thanks to price cuts and a string of titles it was able to achieve 24.5M sales. Switch is still retailing at its launch price, and although Nintendo released the Lite last year to provide an alternative to price-sensitive consumers, their goal of multiple Switches per house-hold will be achieved when the price of both the Lite and OG are lowered. Currently, they are selling what they can ship, but if manufacturing is scaling up they could easily afford to cut the price permanently, right now there is no doubt that Nintendo is making more profit with each Switch sold compared to it's launch as manufacturing & supply chain costs are lowered over time, as the channels expand.
For FY 2020, with the current demand, I think they will easily sell-through >25M units World Wide and if they maintain 25% of supply to Japan, that's >6.25M for the fiscal year. Now if you factor a potential price cut in the fall, the potential is even larger, we are talking >30M units with >7.5M coming from Japan. Will they do it? Depends on whether they are finally able to manufacture at such scale and how much they want to take the focus off the newest Sony/Microsoft consoles and most of all what games they & 3rd party publishers have planned for the rest of their fiscal year.
Last edited by noshten - on 11 July 2020
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