Switch sales hit 500k in Japan

The latest figures from Media Create show that Nintendo’s new Switch console has hit an important milestone in the company’s homeland.

DualShockers reports that as of March 26th Switch unit sales in Japan have hit just sky of 520,000. This figure was hit in under four weeks. Crucially, this puts it ahead of the early pace set by the PS4, which hit 440k units in its first four weeks.

In fact, PS4 took eight weeks to hit the Switch number, with sales slowing significantly after the first month.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that this still puts Switch behind the Wii U, which hit 500k sales in just three weeks, albeit during the holiday season.

Analyst SuperData earlier this month said that it believed Nintendo had sold 1.5m Switch consoles worldwide as of March 14th.

The number was calculated by adding together the estimated 500k US sales, 360k Japanese sales and data from across Europe.Switch sold around 80k in the UK, for instance, and an estimated 110k in France.

That measn that Switch is at the very least now standing at 1.64m, although that’s without however many have been sold in the last two weeks in the West. Nintendo had previously said that it aimed to sell 2m Switch consoles by the end of the month – a number it has almost certainly passed.

The big driver is the critical smash that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which SuperData says was purchased by 89 per cent of Switch owners. That of course means nearly 1.35m sales for the game on Switch alone, to which sales on Wii U must be added.

Nintendo has yet to official reveal any sales figures for the console, stating merely that it has set a new Nintendo record for launch hardware salesin the USandacross Europeas a whole.