2025 Reminder: China Continues to Artificially Boost Game Sales For Other Markets

Animal Crossing officially sold over 8 million physical copies in Japan, but actually...

Licensed Nintendo Store in a mall in Shenzhen, China.

It was recently reported that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold more than 8 million retail copies in Japan.

This is a good time to keep in perspective that a healthy portion of those copies were actually sold in mainland China.
For those familiar with my content over the years, this is fundamentally the core of what I try to message when talking/writing about the Chinese gaming market with its vast and very impactful import market of console games in particular.

Almost every article I wrote for Gamesindustry.biz swirls around this topic at some point or another. I did however write one piece in particular, back in 2020, about the huge success of Animal Crossing for the Switch in mainland China and the impact it had. You can read it here. And thank you if you do.

Game Banned in China, Yet Still Available

The game was such a huge cultural and social phenomenon in China back then, that it even caught the attention from high authorities and ended up being banned in the country!
Yes, actually banned. Not the same as not having a publishing license. Actually...banned! Meaning, censored/removed from most public online platforms, including e-commerce ones such as Taobao (to this day, still).

Also, it enormously boosted Nintendo Switch sales in China, more than probably any other game during the console’s lifecycle (“Ring Fit Adventure” and “It Takes Two” being perhaps the other two that had a somewhat similar impact, perhaps).
To be clear however, the game’s popularity did not come from it being banned. It was the other way around: the game was banned due to how it became so popular and all the user-generated content that went viral at the time. I explain all that in my aforementioned article…

Still, even with the ban, the game continued (and continues) to be easily and widely available for those who seek it. I also reported about that extensively on my Twitter, as you can see here, or here. Also documented below, in these pictures I took myself in a store in Shenzhen (China) where we can see an unlicensed and banned copie of Animal Crossing available: