Switch Sales Now Surpass Lifetimes SNES Sales
Nintendo’s latest earnings release has shown that Switch sales have passed a couple of interesting milestones in the last year. Nintendo has sold a combined total of 52.48 million Switch and Switch Lite units. The Switch counts for 47.3 million of those sales with the Switch Lite making up the remaining 5.19 million sales.
More remarkable than surpassing the 50 million unit mark is the fact that the Switch has surpassed SNES lifetime sales. The Super Nintendo hit 49.18 million units during it’s commercial lifetime. Switch sales in 2019 account for 17.74 million units.
The report detailed Switch game sales along with the Switch sales statistics. The most popular Nintendo Switch game is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with 23 million copies sold. This should come as no surprise as the game was bundled with the system early on and can still be bought in a bundle today. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is the second most popular game with 17.7 million units sold. Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Pokemon Sword & Shield round out the top five with sales of 16.6 million, 16.3 million, and 16 million respectively. Sales for each version of the Given that Pokemon has only been out since November, it seems likely that the game will reach at least the number 3 spot by this time next year.
Nintendo made a large profit this year with over 196 billion JPY. This works out to about 1.8 billion USD or 2.37 billion CAD. There was a notable increase in digital download sales for Nintendo this year. Digital sales made up 28.6% of total sales, which is almost a 7% increase over last year’s 21.8%.
Unsurprisingly, the Nintendo 3DS saw a decrease in sales of both handhelds and games. Nintendo has not released a new 3DS game since Kirby’s Epic Yarn dropped on March 8, 2019. The game was itself a port of a Wii title.
Source: Nintendo of Japan