Correct, it beat out Pokemon Black & White's launch week of 2.63 million back in 2010 on the Nintendo DS.

I think local multiplayer and sitting it alongside Mario Kart/Smash etc a as great couch game could expand it in the west. Hopefully the power jump to Switch 2 makes that more feasible for the next iteration 

Isn't that an all-time launch record for Japan?!

Yes it is.

The previously biggest launch that we have concrete numbers on is Pokémon Black/White, which sold 2.63mil according to Famitsu. Animal Crossing: New Horizons probably sold more than that too though with digital, since it sold 1.88mil physical at launch and a 30% digital share (it was definitely higher than that) would have put it at 2.68mil.

Understatement of the year.

What other game has sold as much/close to that number in Japan? :O

@Roma 

Those are physical numbers btw so Animal Crossing should be a lot higher

Actually I think ~30 % seems about right. We know from their quarterly report that shipped + digital in Japan were at 3.84 mil after 11 days, and it sold 700k in physical sales alone in the second week, so 2.68 mil for the first week sounds reasonable enough.

Seems Splatoon 3 got it beat by well over half a million, which is insane. I wonder if any future Switch games can possibly beat it? I doubt Scarlet/Violet can do it, though they will obviously have a huge launch as well.

OMG what the?!

That's insane. Completely destroyed Japan's all time launch sales record?!

That's truly unbelievable. I figured it'd do a million or maybe 1.5m launch week, given that it's the second Splatoon on the system and seems to just be more of the same good stuff rather than a huge upgrade from Splatoon 2. Splatoon is now a mega series in Japan of the highest order. Now it makes more sense why Switch HW went up so much just for the Splatoon colored system - they're obsessed with the series!!

So it should very quickly enter the top tier of Switch games in Japan (AC, Smash, MK8D, Sw/Sh, Splat2). It might pass MK8D and Smash by end of year to only trail AC, depending on how its legs are the next few months. Wonder if it will do over a million this week.

I wonder what global launch numbers were...like 6-7 million or something??