The Witcher video game and book sales are spiking

Thanks to the widely popular Netflix series, book sales for the IP grew significantly during December. As pre-release publicity for the Netflix series ramped up the week of November 24, physical book sales for The Witcher also began increasing. During the two weeks following The Witcher’s premier on Netflix, USA physical book revenue was 562 percent higher than the same period in 2018. This increase in revenue was driven primarily by The Last Wish: Introducing the Witcher, a book that contains short stories, which take place before the main book series. A new streaming tie-in edition of The Last Wish short-story collection was released on November 12 to capture new readers for the series coming over from the streaming series. This edition was the fastest-selling series title in December 2019, demonstrating the success of the cross-category strategy.

In the world of PC and console gaming, The Witcher was already widely popular. The most recent game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, was released in May 2015. In June 2019, the game’s publisher CD Projekt Red confirmed that the game sold over 20 million units worldwide. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was ported to the Nintendo Switch console in October 2019, just before the Netflix series premiered. These combined factors caused the game to have a strong surge in sales during Q4 2019. U.S. December physical sales for the game were 554 percent higher than December 2018, and still 63 percent higher even when excluding the Nintendo Switch platform.