The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a big hit back when it launched in 2015, earning strong sales and critical acclaim. However, it appears as though the game has gotten a shot in the arm that few titles do five years after its release, as Witcher 3: Wild Hunt game sales have increased considerably.
This is according to a new report by the NPD Group, which claims that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt physical sales jumped by 554 percent in December 2019 when compared to December 2018. The report attributes this huge amount of success to The Witcher Netflix series, which was generally well-received by fans and was one of the top shows on the streaming service last year, beaten out only by the mega hit Stranger Things.
The report acknowledges that there was a new version of The Witcher 3 that came out in 2019 that played a role in the game's sales spike. The game in question is The Witcher 3 Switch port, which came to Nintendo's handheld/home console hybrid in October of 2019. However, the NPD Group notes that sales were still 63 percent higher when discounting the Switch version. And when one considers that this report only takes physical sales into account, it's quite likely that The Witcher 3 sales spike was much more significant overall.
For more evidence of this, one just has to take a look at The Witcher 3 player count on Steam after the show premiered. Shortly after The Witcher's Netflix premiere, The Witcher 3 Steam player count rose dramatically, to the point where it had more active players than it did at launch and broke its own concurrent player record on the platform.
The Witcher 3 video game isn't the only thing that enjoyed some success thanks to the Netflix series. The Witcher book sales have also boomed, as fans impatient for the second season of the show have started diving into the source material to pass the time.
Netflix has captured lightning in a bottle with The Witcher TV series, and it will undoubtedly be looking to capitalize on its success. The Witcher season 2 doesn't premiere until 2021, but work on the show is already underway, so here's hoping the second season is even better than the first.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is out now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: NPD