The Nintendo Switch has been steadily marching forward, leaving a number of broken records in its wake including its strong performance last Thanksgiving season that saw it post its best-selling week ever in the United States at the time. The Switch also became the company"s fastest-selling console less than a week after its launch back in March 2017.
However, that"s not all as far as milestones are concerned. Nintendo"s hybrid console surpassed the Wii U in terms of lifetime sales at the ten-month mark with 14.86 million units sold. The Switch then strode past the GameCube a year ago just before the 23 million unit mark and then the Nintendo 64 in April this year, when it approached 35 million. Now, it seems that we could see the Switch surpass one of its classic consoles, the SNES.
In order to best the 16-bit classic console in terms of lifetime sales, the Switch will need another 7.43 million units sold during the course of Q3 of its fiscal year on top of the 39.72 million that have been sold so far. This might not be such an outlandish prospect given that last year the company managed 9.41 million in sales during the festive season. Nintendo has also been buoyed by the Switch Lite which accounted for 1.95 million sales in the last quarter, roughly 28% of all Switch sales.
The Japanese gaming stalwart also noted a number of notable achievements on the software side in terms of unit sales, including Super Mario Maker 2 (3.93 million units), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2.29 million units), and The Legend of Zelda: Link"s Awakening (3.13 million units) being called out.
However, the Nintendo 3DS continues to dwindle in terms of new sales, with just 370,000 units sold and just one or two new titles released in the first half of the fiscal year in each of Japan, The Americas, and Europe, with the company saying:
"... we will continue to fully utilize the platform"s rich software library to appeal to consumers purchasing game hardware for the first time, while continuing to drive sales of evergreen titles that leverage the hardware install base."
In any case, with Nintendo anticipating 18 million Switch sales for this financial year, the company can only hope that both variants of its console provide enough of an enticement to customers to help hit its target. Of course, it remains to be seen how everything will pan out.