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    5 Thing We Just Learned About Nintendo’s Fastest Selling Console Ever

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    One year later, the Switch 2 is selling great. That was the main takeaway from Nintendo’s latest earnings report, but we also gleaned some other interesting information about how recent releases are performing and whether Switch 2 owners are still buying physical games. Here are five things we learned from the company’s latest financial update:

    The Switch 2 is outselling the Wii

    Despite a price tag that many thought was too high heading into launch, the Switch 2 sold another 3.82 million units last quarter, bringing its lifetime total up to 23.68 million. That makes it the fastest-selling Nintendo console ever in its first five quarters, even outpacing the Wii’s impressive 17.79 million units during a comparable period. The company is projecting total Switch 2 sales to hit 36.35 million by the end of its current fiscal year on March 31, 2027.

    The original Switch is dying but not dead

    Even after Nintendo raised the price of the launch Switch to $340, the console continues to sell. The company reported 660,000 new Switch 1s were sold last quarter. That brings the machine’s lifetime total to 156.59 million. It’s never going to beat the PlayStation 2 at that rate, but it’s still interesting to see it not completely die out. Who is buying a Switch 1 right now when you can get the next-gen model for just $110 more? I’d love to know!

    Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream was a huge hit

    The previously niche franchise blew past the sales of the 3DS entry with 7.96 million units sold as of August 5, Nintendo reported. That’s wild for a quirky life sim that even some fans felt was a bit underbaked relative to what they expected from a series iterating on what it had done a decade before. The game is cross-gen, however, so this was one of the last games that Switch 1 owners, of which there are tons, could get their hands on. Pokémon Pokopia, which was a Switch 2 exclusive from a much bigger brand, hit 3.68 million sales as of the end of June, though that doesn’t count sales in Japan which are handled by The Pokémon Company.

    Yoshi and the Mysterious Book did not crack 1 million sales

    The May puzzle adventure apparently didn’t benefit a ton from Yoshi’s role in the Mario Galaxy Movie. It’s not listed as a top-selling Switch 2 game, and Nintendo did not release sales numbers for it. In fact, we didn’t get sales numbers for Star Fox, either. And the Switch 2 version of Metroid Prime 4 still isn’t listed as a top-seller, which means only six first-party games on the platform have cracked 1 million units sold so far.

    The ratio of digital to physical sales on Switch 2 is ticking upward

    The proportion of digital sales went from 59.3 percent in the first quarter of Nintendo’s last fiscal year to 61.5 percent last quarter. It’s a small but notable shift, especially as digital sales of games like Pokémon Pokopia and Tomodachi Life ramped up (though it’s notable that physical versions of Pokopia sold out quickly, so who knows how many were available to begin with?). Another important caveat is that Nintendo counts game key cards as physical game sales, despite them being DRM keys that require digital downloads. All in all, it suggests the audience on Switch 2 is slowly drifting toward an all-digital future, but much less quickly than players on, say, PlayStation 5.



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