Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire Sell 3 Million Copies in 3 Days

Jason Moses November 27, 2014

Sometimes you forget just how much of a force Pokémon really is. Then you find out that the latest installments of the franchise — Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire — sold over 3 million copies worldwide this past weekend. And then you find out that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to how much a typical Pokémon game usually sells over the course of time.

Take last year’s Pokémon X & Y, which marked the franchise’s transition to Nintendo’s 3DS hardware and quickly became the fastest-selling game in series history, racking up 4 million copies sold in the span of two days (as of this writing, X & Y have sold a total of around 13 million copies).

Or take the games Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire are remakes of — Ruby & Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance — which have sold a combined 16.22 million since their release over 10 years ago in 2003. Humbling numbers, to say the least.

One last thing to note: while Omega & Alpha may have sold a million less than X & Y in first-week sales, the game isn’t even out in Europe yet, and preorders of the game there are even greater than X & Y’s were. So as much as people joke about Pokémon printing money, they’re… basically right.