Nintendo Switch 2 Is Fastest-Selling Game Console of All Time (polygon.com)
- Reference: 0178011179
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/2017228/nintendo-switch-2-is-fastest-selling-game-console-of-all-time
- Source link: https://www.polygon.com/nintendo-switch-2/606222/switch-2-launch-sales-record
> Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a roaring start. Early on Wednesday, Nintendo [1]announced that it had [2]sold 3.5 million units of its new console in just four days , making it Nintendo's fastest-selling console ever. In fact, this is likely the [3]biggest console launch of all time -- by quite some margin. For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first seven weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in a little over two weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month. [...]
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> Nintendo has predicted it will sell 15 million Switch 2s during its current financial year. It's well on the way to that figure already, although Nintendo still faces the challenges of maintaining stock availability and extending this expensive console's reach past the first wave of early adopters. If Switch 2 hits its first-year target, it will join Nintendo's other fasters sellers over the first year on sale: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and the original Switch.
Over the weekend, the Switch 2 beat the record for the " [4]most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," according to TweakTown.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250610751405/en/Nintendo-Switch-2-Sets-Record-Selling-Over-3.5-Million-Units-Globally-in-First-Four-Days
[2] https://www.polygon.com/nintendo-switch-2/606222/switch-2-launch-sales-record
[3] https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1932624211878818015
[4] https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/06/07/2224259/nintendo-switch-2-has-record-breaking-launch-selling-over-3-million-units
Not surprising.... (Score:3)
I mean, seriously, this is not that surprising. It seems like Nintendo delayed the hardware 1-2 quarters to allow for more time to produce more of them ahead of release, and even imported many of them to the USA at least two or so months in advance to avoid all the tariff uncertainty.
I guess the only surprising things might be how quickly it sold out in the USA. Japan was almost certain to sell out, given the pre-order "disasters". But the USA selling out typically being Nintendo's largest market was not as certain. That said, the backwards compatibility and essentially upgrades to 4K+HDR capabilities, was pretty certain that it would be a good seller, even at the higher price point than people had been originally anticipating (I believe fans were hoping for a $350-400 range, but given that it has essentially sold out within 2-3 days of launch across the country at $450, it shows the market could support that price).
Re: (Score:2)
it has plenty of room for price cuts. nintendo is actually selling the "japan only" version (a region-locked version with the menus in japanese only), for USD 100 less in Japan. it's japanese-only to avoid japan tourists (37M of them in 2024, and with 2025 going to surpass it) from buying it at the lower price in Japan.
fans knew this, they bitched about it, and here they are, buying the console like crazy.
oh and games for it are now $90.
One caveat (Score:2)
Nintendo had the advantage of having a lot of Switch 2s available for launch. It was over a year before I randomly saw PS5s for sale. I just bought a Switch 2 after seeing several for sale in a big box store.
I guess itâ(TM)s a good economy after all (Score:1)
Must be if people can go spend money on a new gaming device.
What's the point in these numbers? (Score:2)
"... in just four days"
You know, including the months of pre-orders.
They're probably counting wholesale sales too. Like Walmart bought 1 million, but half of them are still on the shelves or in trucks on their way to stores.
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All the previous consoles they're comparing to would have been in the same boat.
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Except the PS5 had supply chain issues limiting how many they could ship.
The Switch2 launch was delayed to stockpile hardware. It was pushed 6 months
They had over 2 million pre-orders in Japan alone.
If there were 5 million PS5's available at launch, they probably would have sold out, instead it was a year or so before you could go to a store and see them in stock. It was quite a disaster. Launching a year into a global pandemic that disrupted global semiconductor manufacturing and logistics doesn't make for
Re:Availability (Score:4, Insightful)
The SOC is quite a bit more powerful than anything on any phones. Its roughly on par with the Nvidia RTX 3050.
Re: (Score:2)
What I've heard is it's roughly on par with a 2050. Not a 3050. The 3050 comparisons are because it has newer Ray tracing features but you're not going to see a lot of those because they tank the frame rate on much much more powerful hardware than what's in the switch 2.
If the GPU was clocked at its full rated speed it might compete with a 3050 but to maintain cooling and battery life Nintendo underclocked it quite a bit.
Now because of the huge popularity of the console it will probably hit performan
Re: (Score:2)
Heard it's more like a 1050Ti.
Re: (Score:2)
> Geekerwan's video about the Switch 2 was posted here last week [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] . With these specs he calculated the Switch 2 would be close to a GTX 750Ti (similar to Steam Deck's GPU) on handheld mode and close to a GTX 1050Ti on docked mode (so 30% of a RTX 4060 performance, according to techpowerup). That's x7.5 times the performance of the Switch 1 on handheld mode and x7 times on docked mode. CPU is not as good though, he expects it to be quite behind modern CPUs with a geekbench score of 500 in ST and 2800 in MT, compared to 1260 ST and 4300 in MT of Steam Deck's CPU but better than the Switch 1 which scores 167 ST and 481 MT.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pr_V8rtzrE&t=1s
Re: (Score:2)
Their GPU benchmarks are extremely questionable: they make a lot of assumptions and fail to account for a lot of factors. There are so many such assumptions that they might as well have just made up numbers for where they guessed the performance might be.
Their CPU benchmarks aren't as bad, but they do assume that the A78AE and A78C will have identical clock-for-clock performance, despite the architectural difference (2x4 core clusters versus 1x8 core clusters, which matters for things like cache access) and
Re: (Score:2)
It's an nVidia designed GPU, it's not going to be much better than their other offerings on a performance-per-watt perspective. Especially considering it's now a few generations behind.
It's an Ampere based GPU with 1536 CUDA cores at ~1GHz.
An RTX-3050 is the same architecture with 2560 cores and ~1.5GHz and twice the memory bandwidth.
It's a little bit smaller than a mobile 2050, with more, slower memory
Re:Availability (Score:5, Informative)
So much wrong with your statements. Just to start, the original NES was released in 1985 at the price of $179.99, which inflation adjusted to today would be over $530. The SNES in the USA was released for $199.99 in August 1991, which inflation adjusted to today's price would be $470....
Show me a single modern phone that will use 20W of power using it's CPU+GPU capabilities. They are all much lower power, lower performance chips that will typically at most use 8W (think about this logically, you don't have a phone that has a heatsink and fan capable of dissipating that heat of the high performance parts used in the Switch 2).
Re: (Score:1)
> the original NES was released in 1985 at the price of $179.99, which inflation adjusted to today would be over $530. The SNES in the USA was released for $199.99 in August 1991, which inflation adjusted to today's price would be $470....
Yet, consider [1]this [fandom.com] -- consoles used to get price cuts quickly. The SNES launched for $199, but the next year it was selling for $149, and then $99. Meaning, most people paid much less than launch price. On the other hand, the Switch never got a price cut, so in practice it was more expensive; expect the same for the Switch 2.
[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Price_cuts
Re: (Score:1)
the price of the old nintendos wasn't necessarily dropped... It was unbundled. The original had 2 controllers, and the most popular game as a pack in. The later price dropped versions, had one controller and no games to play at all. If you wanted couch multiplayer, and the game everyone else had, you had to pay for them separately which brought the price right back up (or over) the original price. the 'discounted' switch without the bundle, is already available now. You can save $50 NOW by buying the switch
Re: (Score:2)
The "phone SoC" is an Nvidia chip. if you haven't looked lately, Nvidia isn't that keen on making chips that aren't for the datacenter - even gaming PC GPUs are low priority for Nvidia. So Nvidia isn't making chips up the wazoo for Nintendo - likely they agreed to a certain amount of chips and Nvidia will make just that amount and nomore, preferring to make AI datacenter chips instead.