I don't even know how to do a tl;dr of this post, so feel free to skip it haha
When do you all think the fatigue of a game like Animal Crossing began for previous entries? Do any of you have hard data or evidence about it?
If people keep purchasing a game and allow it to reach an evergreen status, it mostly means they like the game or they don't care about what others perceive as "flaws", "lack of content" or whatever.
To put into perspective, since the last financial report, ACNH sold 587,526 physical copies of the game on Japan alone. Add around 30% digital (the exact number has been calculated but I can't find it atm) and you get 750k. That's nuts. Lots of new players keep pouring in even if some have already left (which from a sales perspective is not that bad). New Leaf reached its sales mostly on the same basis, by selling a few thousands each time (heck, the game is still selling).
With around 30 million of copies on its first 9 months in the market (and during a pandemic), it means that everything is going to get amplified. You'll see, for example, many, many posts/tweets/blogs about people leaving the game because there are more players now than the entire franchise combined. If half of the total players dislike the game and don't buy the next game, you still have more copies sold than the 2nd best seller (and most games on the market)- which is what is going to probably happen, NH success was indeed helped by lockdowns around the world but that's not the only factor (nor the most important one). Future entries may reach around 20 million, and with how conservative Nintendo is with their estimates, I don't think that will be seen as bad result (except for some fans who Nintendoom at every step haha)
And that's another point, Nintendo is happy with ACNH not only because it obliterated the expectations set for it, but because the game has brought many new players that are not only buying a Switch and ACNH, but they are buying their other software. It's important, for a company, that a consumer buys many products instead of only one, so even if someone bought a Switch just for ACNH and may have stopped playing it, they are now able to purchase many more products; which they are doing. In Japan, Pikmin got a nice boost from this, for example- that game has (probably with digital) almost surpassed all previous entries there- WW is bit more difficult to know because NPD doesn't give numbers and Europe wasn't kind to it; but the boost has been noted by Nintendo.
There's almost no doubt that Nintendo is giving the developers more resources to work (or they should haha), because the initial goal for the game was to reach 13+ million LTD and they also didn't expect to have to update a game throughout a global catastrophe. Everything has been delayed since that little virus hit the world, so even if they had tons of content written on the update roadmap, it's likely they haven't been able to put all their efforts on updating a game instead of not dying.
As someone mentioned before, we can never know how the developers will react regarding the gameplay changes. Mario Kart dropped the divisive snaking mechanics from its best selling entry and never looked back, Paper Mario hasn't returned to the partner mechanics of fanbase' darling TTYD, Sakurai keeps trying to position Smash as a party game even tho Melee's competitive focus is still around and he has also told people not to expect an "everyone is here" again, Splatoon got rid of some maps and specials but they brought the former back, Zelda's got an almost full revamp in order to stay relevant because it had never hit 10 million copies sold before and Aonuma doesn't want to tell if next entries are going to be back to older gameplay or if those are going to be treated as "spin-offs" (keep in mind BOTW2 is all the DLC they wanted to add to BOTW), etc. There's almost no patterns to be seen, all series drop mechanics and return them from time to time regardless of their status as financial or fan-favorite success. I don't think its worth to be alarmed or the like about what Kyogoku and Nogami may carry from this game to the other.
It's more hopeful to think that from these sales, Nintendo recognizes that women can and should be promoted and given important positions and that the decision to not crunch their developers just to get out the game early is something that needs to happen industry wide. With so many gross things happening around the industry last year around major releases, Nintendo's NH not only avoided those things but did the opposite. Those are key things that Nintendo must keep doing as a whole.
However, Nintendo is reducing its mobile efforts and the successor of the Switch is a critical step for the brand, so a new mainline entry of the franchise is, more than ever, going to be used as the perfect jack of all trades to help its sales- be it as a launch title or as a 3/4 year main title.
