A few days back Nintendo released its earnings report, giving us a look at the lifetime sales of all of its hardware launches. It was unsurprising to see that the Switch is doing extremely well, however, what was a little surprising is that it has sold more in ten months then the Wii U did during its entire run. That’s in 5 years.
Nintendo Switch Sales VS. Wii U
This can be explained by the differences in titles and features that both systems had: the Switch launched major first-party titles early that are open world and frankly rocked just about every review site there is, with Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild selling 9 and 6.7 million respectively.
The Switch also has a solid selection of third-party titles to go along with a growing list of download only games. The Wii U never really seemed to get off the ground and was always waiting for the major titles – it also placed a lot of focus on the second screen gameplay of its tablet. A concept that was, to me, pretty clever, but it was difficult to market and certainly hard to use, even for more experienced gamers. Most thought the Wii U was an attachment for the original Wii.
The Switch is on pace to pass the GameCube’s figure of 21.74m and it may well overtake the Nintendo 64 at 32.93m as well. However, it is still a long way off from the PS4, which Sony believes sold 18 million alone in 2017 bringing its total sales to 73 million. (The PS4 has been on sale since 2013).
With that said, it’s early days yet and the Switch is proving to be a great place for indie developers to get their games noticed in a marketplace that isn’t supersaturated – at the time of writing anyway.