The lockdown is a boon for social-simulation games

By H.B.

THE TIMING was fortuitous. As the coronavirus confined individuals to their homes, Nintendo enabled bored self-isolators to explore different terrain in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons”. More than 2m copies of the social-simulation game have been sold since its release on March 20th; it shifted more copies in its first week than the previous seven “Animal Crossing” games combined. In Britain, GfK, a market-research company, reported that sales of the Nintendo Switch console (on which the game is played) were up 511% on the previous week and 29% on the same week in 2019. A limited edition “Animal Crossing” Switch console sold out within 10 hours of its launch, according to a spokesperson from Currys PC World, a British retailer.

The pleasure of the game stems from its leisurely pace: users board a one-way flight to an uninhabited tropical island, which they must transform into a holiday resort (though the time and the seasons correspond to the player’s own time zone and hemisphere). There are few challenges, setbacks or problems in this fantasy realm. The local residents are friendly talking animals; presents attached to balloons, designed to help the architect, fly across the sky. Once built, shops and museums are always open. The economy is stable—the island currency is “bells”—and money can be harvested from trees or earned by selling fruit, bugs and fish from the island’s plentiful ecosystem.