The Witcher - TV Show Boosts Wild Hunt and Book Sales by 500%
Thanks to the NPD analytics group we learned the exact increase of Sapkowski's books and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sales in the USA. The jumps were huge and were caused mainly by the premiere of The Witcher series on Netflix.
The premiere of The Witcher series on Netflix led to a renaissance in the popularity of CD Projekt RED's games. Until now, we only had statistics from Steam, but now, thanks to the NPD analytics group, we have obtained additional data showing the scale of this success.
Last December, sales of boxed versions of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were 63% higher In the US market than in the last month of 2018. However, after including the results from the Nintendo Switch version released in October 2019, the sales increased by as much as 554%.
Recall that in January, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt set a new record of activity on Steam - 103,000 users playing at the same time.
The NPD also analysed the results of American editions of Andrzej Sapkowski's novels. In the first two weeks after the release of the series, sales of books from The Witcher series in the USA were 562% higher than in the same period of 2018. Some time ago, we wrote that the Orbit publishing house had to commission the re-printing of over 500,000 new copies of all eight books belonging to the witcher cycle.
NPD group also had a lot to say about the results of the series itself. In the first week after the release, at least two minutes of the first episode were played on 19 million American Netflix accounts. For comparison, in the same period The Umbrella Academy achieved a result of 17.5 million.
What's important is that the viewers who gave the series a chance it clearly liked it. 75% of people who started watching The Witcher watched at least 90% of the first episode. Moreover, on Rotten Tomatoes 92% of viewers rated the production positively.
According to NPD analysts, The Witcher series successfully managed the increased interest in the fantasy genre created by Game of Thrones. The franchise has also shown that success in one medium can be transferred to other areas.
