Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night received plenty of acclaim when it came out last year, with critics praising it as a worthy addition to the Metroidvania genre that creator Koji Igarashi helped define. It’s also sold really well, with the Kickstarter-backed action-platformer having sold over a million copies, but in a bit of a surprising turn, it’s been revealed that the largest portion of those sales were on the Nintendo Switch.
The Switch port of Bloodstained had a lot going against it at first, as it not only launched a week behind the other versions but was plagued by performance issues that took months to fix. But according to Igarashi in an interview with Famitsu (as translated by Nintendo Everything), those factors failed to stop the game from selling well on Nintendo’s console.
“The Nintendo Switch. Sales were well above our expectations,” he said when asked which version of Bloodstained had the “biggest response.” This surprised him, he said, because he figured “fans wouldn’t be able to wait the extra week for the Switch version.” Going on, he also revealed that the game was most successful in North America, which made up more than half of the total sales.
As to why Bloodstained was most successful on the Switch, Famitsu and Igarashi speculated that it has to do not only with the Switch’s immense popularity and portability, but the fact that many of the classic Castlevania games he worked on were for portable Nintendo systems. For many fans then, it seems that it was the natural choice to play it on the go, despite the hiccups at launch.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is available for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Nintendo Everything
