Nintendo dominated the sales charts in Australia for 2020

There is little doubt that 2020 was not a great year for many people, but for those who enjoyed videogames, it was pretty amazing as there were dozens of amazing releases and that is on Switch alone.

Well it seems that 2020 was a smashing year for Nintendo, as they managed to sell the most consoles last year and have the best selling game, in fact they did so well, you might think they have a clue about how to sell things.

Starting off with hardware, Nintendo managed to sell 88% more Switch consoles in 2020, than compared with 2019, sadly we don’t have the number. Here are the top selling consoles, in Australia for 2020.

1. Nintendo Switch (all models)
2. PlayStation 4
3. PlayStation 5
4. Xbox One

There’s no data available it seems for the Xbox Series X or S.

It wasn’t just the home console hardware that saw a boost, the controller market was a big hit for them as well. It was so massive that Nintendo managed to sell 110% more Joy-Cons than they did the year before, taking the Number 1 spot for controllers as well.

Now we are going to talk about the games themselves, it has been reported that 15.8 million games were sold, via physical and digital stores and roughly 8.5 million of those were physical, or roughly 54% of all games sold.

It should be noted that Nintendo does not supply sales data on digital sales, so that number could be higher by as little as 1% or 50%, but for now it seems that excluding Nintendo games from the sales charts, the shift swings more to the digital side of the spectrum.

The best selling game in Australia for 2020 was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which again, is only based on the physical sales and the game it beat for the first spot was Grand Theft Auto 5, which is still plodding along 7 years after its first release.

Nintendo was the top physical publisher for the year, amassing 29% of all total sales in the country, but as they don’t supply digital sales, the honour for most digital sales in 2020, goes to Ubisoft, managing to grab 17% of the market.

Here are the top 10 games sold in stores for 2020:

• 1 Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo)
• 2 Mario Kart 8: Deluxe (Nintendo)
• 3 The Last of Us Part 2 (Sony)
• 4 Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Activision Blizzard)
• 5 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft)
• 6 Super Mario 3D All-Stars (Nintendo)
• 7 Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt/Bandai Namco)
• 8 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Activision)
• 9 Minecraft: Switch Edition (Mojang)
• 10 Ring Fit Adventure (Nintendo)

An interesting fact there, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which was released back in 2017, sold 88% more copies in 2020 than it did in 2019.

As Nintendo don’t disclose digital sales, they are not in the chart of those, but for reference here is that list.

• 1 Grand Theft Auto 5 (Rockstar)
• 2 Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Activision)
• 3 NBA 2K20 (2K Games)
• 4 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Activision Blizzard)
• 5 Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (Ubisoft)
• 6 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar)
• 7 NBA 2K21 (2K Games)
• 8 FIFA 21 (EA)
• 9 Uno (Ubisoft)
• 10 FIFA 20 (EA)

Finally, the ultimate list, the top 20 selling games of the year, physical and digital combined:

• 1 Animal Crossing: New Horizons* (Nintendo)
• 2 Grand Theft Auto 5 (Rockstar)
• 3 Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Activision Blizzard)
• 4 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Activision Blizzard)(EA)
• 5 Mario Kart 8: Deluxe (Nintendo)*
• 6 FIFA 21 (EA)
• 7 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft)
• 8 The Last of Us Part 2 (Sony)
• 9 NBA 2K20 (2K Games)
• 10 NBA 2K21 (2K Games)
• 11 Ghost of Tsushima (Sony)
• 12 Just Dance 2020 (Ubisoft)
• 13 Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (Ubisoft)
• 14 FIFA 20 (EA)
• 15 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar)
• 16 Super Mario 3D All-Stars (Nintendo)*
• 17 Cyberpunk 2077 (Bandai Namco/CD Projekt)*
• 18 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 (Activision)
• 19 Minecraft: Switch edition (Mojang)*
• 20 Ring Fit Adventure (Nintendo)*

Now again, Nintendo don’t disclose digital sales, those are marked with the * however, if they did, we might see a few more Nintendo titles move into the top 10, but the fact that Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold more copies just physically than the new Call of Duty did, is crazy.

While 2020 was most certainly a bizarre year, Nintendo seemed to have a pretty great year in comparison. How this all shakes out for their fiscals, well we have to wait a few more weeks on that, but last year, Nintendo managed to sell a little over 10 million Switch consoles in the Oct-Dec quarter, so they might do it again.

Sales data was obtained by GamesIndustry.Biz