Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 31.8 MILLION copies — here’s some silly math on it

I know Nintendo is an international company whose main goal is making money, but despite this I can’t help feeling it’s a cute little upstart that’s mine and mine alone. Sometimes though, it’s hard to avoid the reality. Like today. Because today is the day of Nintendo’s financials.

Yes, the company is doing rather well.

The financials are filled with a raft of interesting facts and figures.

For example, the company has now sold 79.87 million Switch units — finally overtaking the 3DS. On top of that, it also reported a 98.2% year-on-year increase in operating profit. Overall, not a bad time to be Nintendo.

As impressive as these stats are, they weren’t what really caught my attention. That honor went to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Why? Because, as of the end of last year, the has game sold a staggering 31.18 million copies.

That means that just under half of everyone who owns a Switch has Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Which is madness — especially when you consider that it’s a peaceful game where you don’t do much of anything. Where, friends, is the violence?

Because it’s Monday and you can’t stop me, I wanted to think about what that 31.18 million (AKA 31,180,000) copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons meant in real terms. So here it is:

• If you wanted to seat that many people, you’d need 346.4 Wembley Stadiums.
• Buying 31.18 million copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons would cost you roughly $1,870,488,200.
• That means if the game was a country it could force its way into the Trillion dollar club (if you’re an economics expert I do not want to hear from you about this).
• The median play time of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is 60 hours, which means there have been (roughly) 1,870,800,000 hours spent on the game. This is the equivalent to about 1,247,200,000 soccer games.
• The average combined height of humans across the world is 165.25cm, so if everyone who bought a copy of the game laid head to toe, they would stretch 51,524.95km. That’s enough to go around the circumference of the Earth and the moon. But not travel between them.

I could go on, but I won’t. It is Monday after all.

TL;DR: Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold a shit ton of copies and Nintendo had a great year.