Nintendo eShop Argentinian Shenanigans Helped Boost Let’s Build A Zoo Sales

Standing out on Nintendo’s eShop can be a tall order, especially for games that aren’t first-party titles or Switch exclusives, but Let’s Build a Zoo has managed to surge to the top thanks to penny-pinching consumers.

As detailed in a Twitter thread by Mike Rose, who works for publisher No More Robots, something seemed off he noticed that zoo management game was doing incredible sales numbers in Argentina. As Rose discovered though, this was a case of people setting their Nintendo regions to Argentina and taking advantage of that territory selling the game for just $1.50. This would have been demoralizing news to see people take advantage of regional pricing, but the story has a silver lining.

Because Let’s Build a Zoo was selling so well in Argentina, that catapulted it to the top 100 of the eShop charts for the entire Americas region. With the game rising through the ranks–Nintendo counts units sold instead of overall revenue earned for placement on its chart–more US eyeballs were on the product and it wasn’t long before this effect was repeated in the European and Australian eShops.

“A week after launch, we were near the top of the Deals tab on nearly every eShop,” Rose tweeted. “It was specifically the Game + DLC bundle that people were buying in droves, so the average price that people were paying was over $20!”

While it’s good news for Let’s Build a Zoo developer Springloaded and its publisher, Rose did explain that platforms need to consider just how easy region-swapping is for people who want to buy games at the cheapest possible price, a practice that can be very harmful to smaller studios.

The Argentina method hasn’t just been used on Switch games, as Rose noted, but has also been employed on Steam and Xbox platforms.