Video games have triumphed, yet again, over their old archnemesis, “going outside and doing things,” with THR reporting that the gaming industry has, not surprisingly, boomed mightily during the COVID-19 quarantine. Specifically, people are buying games online—where else, right?—in droves, and, even more specifically, they’re buying the hell out of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizon.
You may have heard about this particular title, on account of it taking over the majority of all social media and also human brains for the last two months. The island life game/brutally crushing turnip sales simulator has now, unsurprisingly, become the best-selling digital game in the Nintendo Switch library, period, per a Nielsen data report. While it’s yet to come close to the physical sales of some of the console’s top games, like The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Animal Crossing sold 3.6 million digital units in April alone, handily beating out much-anticipated games like the Final Fantasy VII Remake and Doom Eternal.
It’s still not totally clear how gaming—which is typically seen as being less susceptible to quarantine troubles than live-action film or TV, what with a lot of its work happening from behind computers—will end up weathering our current collective shutting in. Several titles—including the hotly anticipated The Last Of Us Part II—have seen delays, but the industry has been spared the wave of indefinite production shutdowns that have affected other media types. Indeed, the biggest problem being faced might be too much demand; who knows how much higher those Animal Crossing numbers would have been if Nintendo wasn’t facing a sudden shortages of Switch consoles?