Nintendo Switch Ships 79 Million Consoles In Under 4 Years

Nintendo’s latest sales report the numbers are in. They’ve announced that the Nintendo Switch is closing in on 80 million consoles shipped in under 4 years of being on the market. As well as this, and after not being on sale for a full 12 months, Animal Crossing New Horizons is owned by around 40% of all Switch owners.

To put this into perspective, Nintendo’s last handheld – the 3DS family took 6 console variants and 9 years to achieve these numbers. Their last home console, the Wii U only managed 13 million during it’s 5 years on sale. The Switch Lite has around this many sales on its own.

After launching in March 2017, the Nintendo Switch is sitting 5th on Nintendo’s console list:

• Nintendo DS (154 million)
• Nintendo Wii (101.6 million)
• Game Boy & Color (118.7 million)
• Game Boy Advance (81.5 million)
• Nintendo Switch (79.87 million)

Next on Nintendo’s hit list is the Game Boy Advance. These numbers are only up to 31st December 2020. This means that the Switch could pass the GBA in the next few weeks.

With the 2021 line-up expecting to be focused on The Legend Of Zelda due to the 35th anniversary this month. There’s still hints that Mario’s own 35th anniversary could go out with a bang in March, so expect more machines to fly off the shelves.

On the software front, Animal Crossing: New Horizons which released last March, has sold around 31 million copies (both digital and physical). That’s good enough to put it in second place on the console selling list after 9 months on sale.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is at the top of the list with 33 million games in people’s consoles so we could see it dethroned by the end of Nintendo’s financial year in March.

As long as this momentum holds, we expect the Switch to easily eclipse the Wii in terms of sales, but for the moment, it seems Nintendo is printing money at the moment.