Pokémon Sun and Moon sales hit 1.5m in Europe
368,000 games sold in the UK [UPDATE: 3.7m sold in the Americas in under two weeks]
Update: Following the European news below, Nintendo of America has announced that Pokémon Sun and Moon have become the fastest-selling games that Nintendo has ever launched in the Americas, with 3.7 million combined units sold in under two weeks. Nintendo pointed out that the brisk sales pace represents an 85 percent increase over Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, which were the previous record holders for Nintendo's fastest-selling games. For those keeping track, Pokémon-related software has sold more than 280 million units worldwide since launching with the Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version games in 1996.
“With these huge sales figures, Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon have proved themselves as two of the hottest video games to buy this holiday season,” said Doug Bowser, Nintendo of America's Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “With great reviews and outstanding fan response, these next iterations in the Pokémon series are sure to please any player in the family.”
Original story:
Nintendo says that Pokémon Sun and Moon has been its most successful European launch of all time.
The firm revealed that 1.5m games were sold across both titles during its first week on sale. That puts it ahead of hit Wii and DS products, such as Wii Fit.
The UK unit sales for the game was 368,000, it's not clear if those are internal Nintendo numbers or from GfK.
Sun and Moon has been one of the few big hits of this Q4, with launch week sales of the games eclipsing the first week performance of Watch Dogs 2, Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 combined. Its performance even puts it close to the opening week of this year's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
3DS sales also spiked on the back of the game's launch. According to retail sources, almost 36,000 3DS and 2DS machines were sold during the game's launch week in the UK.
The success of the game can be traced directly to the popularity of recent smartphone sensation Pokémon Go, but Sun and Moon also achieved very high review scores and was advertised heavily by Nintendo.
On Monday, I said that the success of Sun and Moon proved that " if you have the right product at the right time (and perhaps targeting a slightly different audience) then consumers will still come out to the shops to buy games in boxes. And at full price, too."
Across the world, Nintendo shipped 10m copies of Pokémon Sun and Moon to retailers, and a recent Adobe retail report says that the two games combined were the most popular games product during the Thanksgiving weekend.