The Switch is Now Nintendo's Best-Selling Console of All Time (theverge.com)
(Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:00AM (msmash)
from the moving-forward dept.)
- Reference: 0180724754
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/02/03/0848248/the-switch-is-now-nintendos-best-selling-console-of-all-time
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/games/872768/nintendo-earnings-switch-best-selling-console-ds
The original Switch is officially Nintendo's best-selling console of all time [1]after surpassing the DS handheld in lifetime sales . From a report:
> In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintendo DS.
>
> In November, Nintendo reported that the Switch and DS were neck and neck. We expected the holiday sales period would see the Switch surpass the DS, even with Nintendo announcing that primary development would focus on the Switch 2. Nintendo previously said that it would continue to sell the original Switch "while taking consumer demand and the business environment into consideration."
>
> Nintendo has to keep selling the Switch if it wants to dethrone Sony's PlayStation 2 as the best-selling video game console of all time. The PlayStation 2, discontinued in January 2013, sold more than 160 million units over its 13-year lifespan.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/games/872768/nintendo-earnings-switch-best-selling-console-ds
> In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintendo DS.
>
> In November, Nintendo reported that the Switch and DS were neck and neck. We expected the holiday sales period would see the Switch surpass the DS, even with Nintendo announcing that primary development would focus on the Switch 2. Nintendo previously said that it would continue to sell the original Switch "while taking consumer demand and the business environment into consideration."
>
> Nintendo has to keep selling the Switch if it wants to dethrone Sony's PlayStation 2 as the best-selling video game console of all time. The PlayStation 2, discontinued in January 2013, sold more than 160 million units over its 13-year lifespan.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/games/872768/nintendo-earnings-switch-best-selling-console-ds
It could stall out at these prices (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward
This is only talking about their momentum. Unfortunately the cost is prohibitive to replace all those $150-$200 Switch Lites. Parents aren't going to do that. This isn't like the pandemic where people are spending extra on entertainment either. Prices are also rumored to go up because of the priority AI hardware is getting. RAM and processors and other components in the Switch 2 are going to go up in price.
If they don't come out with something cheaper that momentum will stall and then it will end up selling
I wonder (Score:1)
Anyone else feel like this is almost exclusively because they didn't produce and ship enough Wii consoles for like 3-4 years? Really no excuse for that other than shooting yourself in the foot for "it's hard to get!" prestige, which does work for Rolex but few other brands.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think it was for prestige. The huge success and Wii Fit craze took everyone by surprise, likely including Nintendo themselves. Add that Sony were losing it with pricing/drm/whatever and a whole "Wii Sixty" meme was born - cheaper to buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 than a single Playstation (I forget the gen - 3? 4?).
Remember Nintendo were coming off relatively poor market share - for all the nostalgia today, the Gamecube in its day was considered a failure and very much an afterthought (although I seem
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and there's plenty of stories about companies that *did* spend crazy amounts to expand capacity to meet demand only for the fad to die down before that spend could even matter, and then they spend all that for nothing.
When a company is faced with a surprise demand surge, they are carefully considering the likelihood of the surge subsiding before they can even do anything.
Re: (Score:2)
I never really understood all the hate for Game Cube from 'serious gamers' .
When using RGB out at 480P most games looked just as good as the 'HD' competition. The performance was fine, but I guess it was memory staved because it seems like the GC version of some 3rd party titles got cut down a bit.
There was NOTHING more fun then MK Double Dash with about four people and game cubes with broadband adapters.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh I had the Gamecube. Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Luigi's Mansion...plus let's talk about that Wii Fit 'craze' for a moment. It seriously changed my life.
At the time I got the Gamecube, I was unfit and pretty overweight. There was a poster here on Slashdot who in one thread or another said "How many overweight 30 year olds do you know? A lot, right? How about 40 - still a lot? Now try 50, 60, 70...". This really stuck with me, and I decided to use Wii Fit properly. Started out jogging round the living ro
Re: (Score:2)
> I never really understood all the hate for Game Cube from 'serious gamers' .
Because Nintendo was considered "family friendly" games and they generally discouraged the violent and dark FPS games that were the rage at the time in favor of more family friendly games.
While the original Xbox and PS2 were playing the cutting edge games and shooters, they considered Nintendo to be for kids - the Xbox and PS2 were the "adult" gaming consoles. (No doubt helped by the way Sega positioned the Genesis/Megadrive back in
Re: (Score:2)
I think the challenge was that publishers saw Gamecube as a platform from a vendor that wasn't historically the easiest to work with business-wise, and with game sizes limited to 1.5GB whereas Xbox and PS2 did the full 8.5GB disk size. Of course Sony enjoyed coming off of Playstation being *the* platform (N64 cartridges severely limited them, Saturn made some bad bets technology wise), so a Playstation 2 that was *backwards compatible* was a slam dunk.
Xbox didn't do that well either, Sony was largely still
Re: (Score:2)
I had no idea that the PS2 could do HD. I can't really blame Nintendo for not bothering, in 2001 there weren't many people in the US with an HD TV. Maybe there weren't that many in Japan either.