Nintendo announced today that the Switch had broken 10 million sales. An astonishing number, given the Wii U before it, analyst projections being much lower, and the holiday season still to come. The Switch has been a hardware success story only equaled by Nintendo’s software success stories between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey both released this year.
To put that sales figure in context, I wanted to go back and see how it stacked up to other current and former consoles. As it turns out, it’s among some of the best in recent memory, as you might expect.
- With a March 3rd, 2017 launch, the data on December 10th, 2017 says that it took the Switch 9 months and 7 days to sell 10 million units.
- In contrast, the PS4, launched on November 15th, 2013, took about 8 months and 29 days to sell 10 million units, almost identical. The difference being that Sony had a full holiday sales window while Nintendo hasn't had that with the Switch yet.
- The Wii also took about nine months to sell 10 million units, and that was when it was a worldwide, non-gamer craze unlike anything the industry had seen.
- The Xbox One took about a full year to ship 10 million units, not sell-through, and we don’t have the data for those exact figures.
- The Wii U, Nintendo’s last console, took 2 years and 7 months to sell 10 million units, and it ended its run at 13.5 million units. It is entirely possible, if not likely, that the Switch could outsell the Wii U in totality in its very first year on the market.
So yes, all of this is very impressive. And honestly, what Nintendo is doing with the Switch is even more impressive than Sony’s PS4 numbers, even if the timeline is similar, because last generation, Sony sold 80+ million PS3s. Nintendo sold 13.5 million Wii Us. Granted Nintendo is Nintendo and is capable of turning sewer water into wine, but even for them, that kind of turnaround is impressive.
Will the Switch go on to outsell the PS4 in the long run, which now has 70 million sales worldwide? It’s entirely possible, and we also have to remember that this is an era where Nintendo’s dedicated handheld hardware will be coming to an end, and the Switch will also serve that purpose. We already know that the next Pokémon game will be on the Switch, and if that’s not going to be an even more massive sales driver than Zelda and Mario, I don’t know what is. Not to say that Nintendo will be able to full combine its past handheld + home console sales, but if it can even come close, nothing else on the market will be able to compare to it, Sony included. For now, they could not be off to a stronger start.
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