A Lot Of Women Bought A 3DS For Animal Crossing: New Leaf In Japan

A large number of Japanese women have bought Nintendo 3DS systems specifically to play Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Nintendo shared in a recent earnings Q&A session.

Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, presented the above chart to attendees. The chart on the right shows the number of women (in pink; men are in blue) who registered Animal Crossing: New Leaf and the Nintendo 3DS system on Club Nintendo in the same week, indicating that these people bought 3DSes specifically for the game.

Several of these women who registered both the console and the 3DS hardware together, Iwata says, were between the ages of 19 and 24.

Above is another chart. It shows that, while Animal Crossing: New Leaf is most popular with 10-12 year-old girls, the game is selling to a large number of women ranging from 19–24 as well. In fact, it’s selling more to this age group than the previous game on Nintendo DS, Animal Crossing: Wild World.

The reason? All of the 10-12 year-old girls who bought Animal Crossing: Wild World are now older, and were among the first people to pick up New Leaf.

More women owning 3DSes means good things for certain third-party developers, too. Games like the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series, published by Marvelous AQL, have significant female followings, and could benefit from the larger female userbase.