The little darling of the console industry that is the Nintendo Switch has hit a new sales milestone—111.08 million units sold worldwide.
This news comes directly from Nintendo, which released its latest financial report from its Q1 results for FY2023.
Nintendo also updated the number of software units that have been sold, coming in at an eye-watering 863.59 million units worldwide. That’s right, nearly one billion pieces of software (including full games and DLC) have been sold for the Nintendo Switch. This encompasses both physical and digital sales numbers.
The Nintendo Wii still holds the crown for most amount of game unit sales for a Nintendo home console, with that number being 921.85 million units. The original Nintendo DS has the largest numbers across the board, with 154.02 million hardware units sold and 948.76 software units sold worldwide. Yet, now within its fifth year on the market, the Switch continues to catch up to the DS’ success.
While trends have been great, the Switch has seen some declines in this quarter as well.
In the previous quarter, the system sold 3.43 million units, but during the same timeframe back in 2021, it sold 4.45 million units. Is this due to interest in the Switch finally shrinking? Not at all; Nintendo actually mentioned that demand across all regions has remained at the same level.
The real reason is due to the ongoing semiconductor shortage that’s been affecting the tech world as a whole. Thankfully, the company is now finally seeing an end in sight.
Addressed in the same report, Nintendo is now expecting supplies to finally flow at normal levels come Fall 2022, which is in just a matter of months. So, while the effects of this shift won’t be seen immediately, by next year consumers should start seeing Switch units more readily available. The same should also apply to other systems like the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and the Steam Deck.
With this report, the Nintendo Switch is now firmly on track to potentially end its life either coming very close or even surpassing the original Nintendo DS.
While it’s still a good ways away from selling the 43 million more units required to do that, considering that the Big N is expecting to sell 21 million units by March 2023, that means that the Switch could, theoretically, hit that goal by 2024.
[Source: Nibel via Twitter]
