Due to COVID-19, 2020 has been far from a normal year. Even now, depending on your region, you’re still possibly stuck at home in quarantine, and even if not, most likely you’re doing your best to stay indoors when possible. Because of that, many have taken refugee in their various hobbies, with video games being a big one. One game that hit in some of the worst parts of the pandemic was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and it seems the game was designed to spread like wildfire.
According to Twitter, discussion on that platform for gaming increased drastically, with 2020 already seeing a billion posts about games. For comparison, for the total of 2019 there were 1.2 billion posts, which they estimate to be a 71% year-over-year increase in volume, and 46% YoY increase in unique authors. At the top of that list for the first six months was Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s quite impressive when you consider that the game didn’t come out until the end of March, meaning that half of that time was pre-release.
It’s probably not too big of a shock since Nintendo recently announced that the game had crossed the 22 million sold unit mark, making it one of the biggest games of the year by a far margin. The only game I could imagine surpassing it in sheer Twitter volume would be The Last of Us Part 2, but it didn’t release until June.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for the Nintendo Switch with updates for cooking and farming possibly coming soon.
