Nintendo eShop scammers helped this indie game reach number one

techradar.com:

Let’s Build a Zoo’s story is one of confusion, surprise, and scammers. Something that reflects what it’s like to develop smaller games in this industry. 

When the developers at Springloaded went to bed the night after pre-orders went live, I doubt they could imagine what they would wake up to in the morning. Come the next day, their pre-order sale has skyrocketed, a momentous occasion for any indie game developer. But there was just one catch, 85% of Nintendo Switch pre-order sales were from Argentina. Sounds slightly suspicious. 

It was then that the developers realized they were in trouble. It turns out that people were going to sites like ‘eShop Prices’ and were checking out where to get the cheapest deals for Nintendo games and Let’s Build a Zoo featured heavily on all of them. 

Mike Rose, the director at No More Robots who published Let’s Build a Zoo, tweeted, “just 1000s of people buying the game, and us earning less than $1 for each sale”. This could have been the end to quite an upsetting story for everyone behind Let’s Build a Zoo, but as fate would have it, they were in for a win. 

Despite losing out on a stack of money due to these scammers, “these super cheap sales in Argentina were putting us in more US player eyeballs’, Rose tweeted, explaining that the Let’s Build a Zoo pre-orders were seen as US sales and so it pushed the game up the US best-sellers charts. 

The US eShop is *not* the US eShop.It's the «Americas» eShop. Any sales anywhere in the Americas, were treated as sales across the whole of the region.By getting shitloads of sales in Argentina, we were being boosted up the charts for people in the US!October 13, 2022

After the US eShop store was conquered, Let’s build a Zoo went on to get onto the charts