According to recent reports, the Nintendo Switch has become a major success in terms of games and hardware sales. Nintendo revealed the most recent sales figures for both the Switch and the available software for the platform, which turned out to be extremely high.
As of December 31, 2018, the Switch has now collectively sold 32.27 million units worldwide. Yes, you read that stupidly high amount correctly. It appears that the marketing and development strategies of focusing on both casual and mobile experience has seriously paid off for the Japanese company. It seems as though the majority of these sales came from sales of major releases like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Comparing to the same announcement from last year, the number of Switch consoles in the market has more than doubled.
It’s worth mentioning that the console itself is sold pretty close to cost, only generating a small profit per unit. The $299 MSRP is estimated to be only about $30-$50 above the production cost of one unit. Still, that’s millions of dollars in the coffers over in Nintendo-land.
But it’s not just hardware sales that have given Nintendo an extremely popular and profitable 2018. Nintendo has released more than 100 physical titles for the platform, in addition to a horde of digital titles, which have driven tons of gamers to the portable gaming platform. The Switch has now collectively sold 163.61 million units of software over its lifetime.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe managed to sit atop the pile by selling 15.02 million copies. Super Mario Odyssey, which was previously the platform’s best-selling title, now sits at 13.76 million units. By far the most staggering of all these numbers though is that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has already become the Switch’s third best-selling game and in total sold 12.08 million copies so far, that’s pretty fast. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild now sits at 11.68 million units. The other major high-profile releases are the Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee games, which have shipped right around 10 million units. That’s of course just a small snapshot, many other titles have shifted millions of units.
Other areas of Nintendo property continue to remain a strong addition to their profit numbers. The Nintendo DS lines of hardware has consistently managed to shift hundreds of thousands of units since 2014, although the massive growth of the Switch in 2018 has outpaced that consistency with insane growth.
When considered altogether, it looks as though Nintendo is setting a brilliant pace for the final quarter of 2018, and heading into 2019. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the future. But since they’re currently sitting on several quarters of hundreds of billions of Yen, things are looking up.
Source: Nintendo
