Nintendo Switch sales fall short of expectations – but still exceed 150 million units

Nintendo has released the first sales numbers for the Switch ahead of the release of its latest console in the company’s latest financial report.

The company reports that the Switch has sold 150.86 million units, as reported by GoNintendo. While that seems like an impressive number, that’s actually an underperformance of what Nintendo forecasted.

It also represents a drop in units sold when compared to the same period of last year, with Nintendo selling 9.54 million units in the three quarters of this financial year, ending in March 2025. That’s 30.65 lower than the 13.74 million units they sold in the same time period from last year.

Looking at the wider gaming industry, Sony recently revealed that it sold 160 million units of the PlayStation 2 console, so the 150 million mark for the Switch brings it one step closer to being the best-selling console of all time.

While that’s a tempting moniker to win, Nintendo’s focus is surely on profit. With the Switch 2 on the horizon, it seems likely that sales of its predecessor will slow down throughout the year, with people preferring to hold off and wait for the latest model.

Indeed, the decrease in sales between last year and this year seems to suggest that the Switch 2’s arrival is well-timed, coming when consumers had begun to lose interest in Nintendo’s gaming console.

Of course, when more is known about the Switch 2, if fans don’t see new features they love about it, sales of the original Switch could spike once again with people wanting to get a recent make of a preferred console model. Details are still low on the ground of what exactly the Switch 2 will bring – or, perhaps most crucially, how much it will retail for.

Nintendo still has plenty of hardware accessories and customization options available for the original Switch, so it’s clear that sales are not expected to plummet into nothing. Nonetheless, 2025 will be a telling time for the gaming brand and its fans.

Featured image: Nintendo

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