UK Charts: Animal Crossing: New Horizons Topples FIFA To Reclaim Number One

woohoo! now let's have some more variety in bugs and fish and also some better nook ticket islands!

Yeah bored of getting peach trees and roses on islands when using nook mile tickets !

Stop whining, maybe you play too many hours. #corona

This has been an amazing game playing with friends. Totally deserves all the sales it’s getting.

Yes great game, bought for my daughter. Didn't think I'd go near it and yet I'm playing it and so is my son.

Great to see it better Fifa...
It's the one Nintendo franchise I just can't get into but I obviously want it to continue to sell by the bucket load to continue Switch's/Nintendo's success.
What lucky timing for Nintendo releasing this when they did, it's the perfect game to play for hours in lockdown....

Seems pretty clear that Animal Crossing and Ring Fit Adventure will continue to sell extremely well while it's in stock.

Good stuff. Will be adventuring on with my fourth day of Ring Fit this afternoon. I'm already noticing huge improvements

Kinda sucks that Animal Crossing was hit so much by the lack of Switch hardware and software supply over the last month, so it's good to see things begin to return to normal.

Im happy for any game that knocks that cash cow trash FIFA down a peg

Sad to see FF7 dropping so fast. Such an expensive game to develop and took forever to make. Hurray for Animal Crossing, best game ever made.

I just wanted to see whether GTAV was at number 5 or 6. It didn't disappoint.

Thank you Nintendo. My ring is now fit for adventure and I love it. The game that is...

Persona 5 Royal was out one week in the top 10 then gone completely out of the top 40 I guess Persona isn't as popular as the fan base makes it out to be

Yeah yeah jolly good and all but it would be nice to know what else Nintendo has planned for the year. So far it's been nothing but Animal Crossing.
Sure there's some good third-party stuff on the way but first-party???
As nice as the mini-direct was there wasn't any big Nintendo games shown.
2020 so far = Animal Crossing.

I knew Animal Crossing would do well but to be pretty much the next best thing after Mario Kart 8 is stunning success.

Also, big shout out to Luigis Mansion 3. I had no idea that the series was as liked as it is as its pretty much hung around for 6 months now.

@KBuckley27
Most JRPGs are extremely frontloaded and the UK isn't a great environment for JRPGs.

Why is Luigi's Mansion 3 still charting so well? As far as I'm aware it's not been on offer or being bundled with the Switch Lite.

I mean, it's great and all, just confusing!

For a second there I wondered what Animal Crossing could possibly have to do with Topless FIFA.
Alas Topless FIFA remains but a dream.

@ukaskew

Luigi is the man, that's why!

@WiltonRoots
After almost seven years <3

@mesome713 Perhaps FFVIIR1 is a "foundation", that is, they'll reuse aspects the game engine, character models, battle system and other features for future FFVIIR games, so they shouldn't take as much time and money to develop as the first part...

@KBuckley27 Atlus Guy 1: Hey, let's re-release the same >100 hours game we already launched a few years ago on exactly the same console, with just a few hours of extra content!

Atlus Guy 2: Yeah, and let's also release it at around the same time as many other hyped, long awaited games, such as Animal Crossing New Horizons, DOOM ETERNAL, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake! There's no way that most players will prefer one of those new games over a shiny version of another game they already played recently!

Atlus Guy 3: And let's not give players who already played P5 the opportunity to download the expansion as a DLC, like Warriors Orochi 4 and Street Fighter IV allows them to! They want it, they must buy the entire game again!

Bubsy: What could possibly go wrong?

@mesome713 @SmileMan64 The engine and many of the assets in FFVII Remake will almost certainly be repurposed for the sequels, which should shave development time. Also, considering S-E basically scrapped what was done by CyberConnect2 and re-developed the entire game around 2017, this version of the game didn't actually have an inordinately long development time.

Also, not really worried about the sales.

• Almost everyone I know IRL who owns this got it digitally. Physical copies sold fast and people have been posting it at scalper prices online for weeks.
• JRPGs never seem to sell very well in the UK anyway. North America will be where FF7R makes the bulk of its money.

At launch, even with the pandemic causing supply issues, it sold about 3.5 million in three days. That's very respectable, and it's not like the game won't keep selling, especially digitally.

I thought Ring Fit was sold out everywhere?

Aww, don’t let the Animal Crossing review bombers read this! Their pwecious widdle feewings might get hurt!

Also, those FFVII sales are... okay? I mean it isn’t selling badly per se, but i definitely thought it would make a bigger splash. I personally didn’t love the game. Combat was fun and the game is GORGEOUS, but the linearity (squeezing through small spaces to get to another area) got annoying after a while, the story turned into absolute drivel by the end (thanks Nomura for putting Kingdom Hearts plot convolution into a remake of a game that was already plenty convoluted), and I didn’t love all of the remixed songs. Some were great though. Also, I was willing to give them the benefit of doubt when I heard about the game being episodic, but after playing it I just can’t see why other than it being due to budget and time. There was a lot of filler added, and most of it didn’t make the game better. The character stuff was nice and an improvement, but they added a lot of generic JRPG side quests where you go back to areas you’ve already been to fight monsters. Final Fantasy VII does not need filler content.

It’s a pretty good game, but I won’t be buying the next one. I was under the impression this was going to be a remake of VII with the same story, but everything went totally off the rails and not for the better at the end. They should have just called this something else. Make it a kind of pseudo-sequel to 7, have the first five hours or so mirror the original game and THEN add your weird plot twists and continue playing from there.

All in all, if you haven’t played VII before please just play the original. The graphics are very dated but otherwise it’s still very playable today. I can’t recommend the remake when it isn’t even a remake, you are not going to get a good idea of what FFVII is about by playing it, especially with the next couple games.

@Ralizah Yeah 3.5mil digital and physical isn't too bad, but it's not expected either. The last FF7 sold almost 17mil. So it's a major drop off.

Remake sold 1mil in Japan, so I thought would do much much better in US. It's also not charting in top 100 on Amazon video games in US. I expect them to drop the price soon. Which will hurt the developers.

@Ralizah That's good to know. Hope that in the end FFVIIR meets sales expectations.

@mesome713
FFVIIR is experiencing extreme retail shortages across the globe so don't expect its Amazon sales to reflect its actual sales.

@westman98 So is Animal Crossing, yet it's digital and physical are still in top 10.

@mesome713
The retail supply situation for Animal Crossing has gotten better in recent weeks and the game was always going to be more successful than FFVIIR to begin with.

@westman98 But we would see higher digital sales on FF7 but we dont. And if people are waiting this long, they might as well wait till price drop. Which by then the game would have flopped.

This isn't some cheap Nintendo rpg. This is big big budget. And they had to start over once which lost them a bunch of money. And Square is adevertizing like crazy, it's one of the most advertized games of 2020. If they are having supply problems, they should stop wasting so much money on advertizing cause it's not working.

@mesome713
These charts are retail only so they wouldn't be able to tell you how much the game sold digitally.

In Japan, FFVIIR had a ~35% digital attach rate. I'm expecting a 45-50% digital attach rate in the west, so expect to see big digital sales.

Not sure what a high advertising budget has anything to do with thus. The supply issues stem from the fact that global manufacturing and logistics have been disrupted from the virus, not because Square Enix didnt spend enough money in manufacturing.

@westman98 We already know the numbers. 3.5 million digital and physical. The digital isn't charting as a best seller, so not looking too good. Animal Crossing digital is like top 3.

You don't spend massive amounts of money on advertizing if you havin issues shipping to people. Nintendo had problems with massive demand and getting physical copies to people, yeah theyre still breaking records.

Maybe they should have delayed the game, cause this is probably gonna cost them a lot . Their sales numbers are looking pitiful.

@mesome713
"The digital isn't charting as a best seller, so not looking too good. Animal Crossing digital is like top 3."
What digital chart are you looking at?

"You don't spend massive amounts of money on advertizing if you havin issues shipping to people."
There is no issue with people downloading the game.

I do agree that the game should have been delayed by a month or so like TLOU2 to get the global manufacturing issues sorted out. But I'd hardly say that sales are pitiful. Retail supply is pitiful? Yes. Overall retail + digital sales are pitiful? No, not at all.

@RPGamer

Bud, did we not go through this in the last UK chart article!? Or do you just like slagging off people with different tastes?

Also if you can't realise Animal Crossing is pretty much the definition of a casual players game then it doesn't say much about you.

@ReaperExTenebris

Jog on. I enjoy Fifa and I won't apologise for it.

@ReaperExTenebris

Well I play on PS4 so it is not a simple roster update. If the Switch version discounted to a tenner then maybe I would buy that.

EA don't hide the fact it is a simple roster update on Switch either so people don't go in blind and if they do that is their own fault. I research a game before paying 30/40 quid for it.

@RPGamer

Cool