In the console generation following their innovative but ultimately doomed home console, the Wii U, Nintendo has managed to make Nintendo Switch their most popular and best selling console of all time, selling 103.54 million units worldwide since its March 3, 2017 debut.
The console has just surpassed Nintendo’s former home console darling, the Wii, which had sold just over 101 million units in its lifetime.
The next tier of sales to achieve would be to surpass the Game Boy and Game Boy Color series of handhelds at nearly 120 million units, while the ultimate goal would be the Nintendo DS, at over 154 million units.
Nintendo Switch has seen much of the console and handheld market converge, and the Kyoto-based company no longer produces a dedicated handheld console, and it is much more likely that there are multiple Nintendo Switch consoles in a single household as they fill the gap in the handheld market much of the time.
Other notable consoles that the Switch has surpassed is the original PlayStation (102.49 million units), the PlayStation 3 (87.4 million units), and Xbox 360 (84 million units).
The Switch is also more successful than the combined total of all of Sega’s home and handheld consoles, which have sold under 80 million units in total.
The best selling console of all-time, the PlayStation 2, narrowly beats the Nintendo DS’ sales numbers by just a few million units, with Sony selling around 158 million PS2s.
Comparing the growth curve of Nintendo’s console to Sony’s most successful one, after five years, the PS2 had sold just under 90 million units, while Nintendo is on track to beat that by nearly 20 million units, as they are targeting to sell at least another four million units by the end of their fiscal year ending March 31, 2022.
With this type of growth, and new releases such as system-selling games like the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, new console variations like the OLED Model and Nintendo Switch Lite, as well as the likely sequel to Super Mario Odyssey, among others, Nintendo Switch could potentially be on track to outsell the PlayStation 2 within just a few more years.
Nintendo has said that they’re only about halfway through the Switch’s life cycle so far, and though sales will surely slow down, they’re looking more and more likely to sell through these units by the day.