© Nintendo LifeOur friends over at GamesIndustry.biz love crunching the numbers and turning them into lovely charts, and we love reading them. Their “Year In Numbers” for 2020 shows a pandemic-fuelled frenzy of video game spending, with a 21% increase in the value of the console market, proving that we’ve really just spent this whole year playing video games instead of working.
In a reveal that probably surprises no one, our beloved Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the second-highest selling game in the UK, beating out Minecraft, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Ring Fit Adventure. The relatively-recent release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars even managed to crack the top ten best-selling games in the US, which makes the fact it’ll be gone soon even more strange. All in all, a pretty good year for ol’ Ninty.
Taking a look at some of the big numbers for the House of Mario this year, it looks like they’ve raked in the big bucks: AC:NH made $26.04 million in its first six months, and Pokemon GO – a four-year-old game – is the third-best-selling mobile game of 2020, netting the various companies involved a total of $1.2 billion.
It’s not all fun and prizes, though. Switch exclusive Tiny Racer holds the dubious honour of “Worst Game” (their words, not ours) with a Metacritic average of 32.
To no one’s great surprise, Among Us is the most-Googled game, but the multiplayer betray-a-thon fails to crack the top ten in every other category, including “Most Covered Game”, “Most Watched on YouTube”, and “Most Discussed On Twitter”. It seems like players want to know all of the secrets behind Among Us, but no one wants to share them. Pity.
If you’re still here after all those numbers and figures, then here’s an interesting tidbit from the report for you: Nintendo Switch owners are the most likely of all to also have another one of the big three. 60% of Switch players also have a PlayStation 4, and 51% have an Xbox One. Either Switch owners don’t care about the console wars, or they’re all minted.
You can check out the full report with all the delicious, juicy statistics in it over on GamesIndustry.biz. What we really want to know is: are you as surprised as we are to see FIFA 21 at the top of the UK charts? Or are we just a nation of footy-lovers, even when the footy isn’t on?
