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tbone51 on 25 March 2021
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You say that then there are games like Monster Hunter (for psp), Pokémon for GBC, GTAV for literally multiple systems, Mario Kart, etc. 

ACNH is the fastest selling game ever I think after GTAV, 30mil+ in 9 and half months. 11mil with initial launch and 20mil+ throughout the rest of the year.

Shadow1980 said:
curl-6 said:

So we agree that Animal Crossing's impact cannot be ruled out as a factor. Again, I never said the pandemic wasn't a factor, just that it was not the sole or majority factor.

New Horizons massively expanded the system's demographic reach by appealing to non-gamers in a way that nothing on the system did so strongly and compellingly up to that point. Suddenly millions of people who had no interest in the system had a strong reason to buy one. It's the kind of killer app that rolls around only once or twice in even a very successful system's life.

As for past AC games, no Zelda before BOTW crossed 20 million either; unprecedented things do happen.

And you are of course free to continue to view Switch only through the lens of past system's patterns, but that why your predictions on it have been off base, you're measuring an apple by the standard of oranges.

For March? Yes. For April? Big games often have a residual effect into their second month. For the rest of the year? No chance. Just so we're clear on that regard, that way nobody misrepresents my point.

No one game has ever caused a long-term increase in baseline sales, not even modest growth. Every single instance on record of a game causing a boost in sales has always been a very short-term one. Pretty much everybody that buys a system for a specific game does so within the first month or two of that game's release. AC gave an assist for the first month or two after its release, but there's no reason to think it was moving any appreciable amount of surplus hardware going into late spring/early summer and beyond. Prior to the pandemic, the only things that have been proven to cause substantial long-term increases in sales were price cuts and major hardware revisions. Both of those can be ruled out for the Switch. Meanwhile, we saw clear evidence of an across-the-board increase in demand not just for the Switch, but for the PS4 & XBO as well.

Also, there's another good argument against the idea that AC was still driving the majority of growth well beyond its release month. While numbers have been scarce for the U.S., we do have numbers for Japan, and they show what we see with every other game in the history of ever: declining sales over time. As with hardware, there's only a certain number of of people out there willing and able to buy a particular game. Software is almost always extremely front-loaded, with often times half or more of lifetime sales coming in just the first month. Sometimes you get games with decent legs, but even those see sales months down the road that are vastly less.

Animal Crossing is no exception.