Switch sales soar under pandemic to 68.3m units lifetime

Switch sales soared over the key six months of the global pandemic, Nintendo revealed today in its half-year results.

Hardware sales for Switch shot up year on year. Nintendo sold 12.53m Switch units between March and September 2020, up from 6.93m in 2019 (up 80.9 per cent). The balance of Switch and Switch Lite units remained largely unchanged, with Switch selling roughly double its little sibling with 8.36m versus 4.17m.

All that now puts the Switch family on 68.3m units sold, lifetime to September 2020. We can only wonder how much more it could have shifted had it had more stock, but then who would stockpile all that inventory in this day and age, the pandemic simply wasn’t predictable.

Software units also surged up for the six month period, from 58.5m in 2019 to 100.3m in 2020 (up 71.4 per cent). That makes for 456.5m sales to date, an attach rate for first-party titles alone of an incredible 6.7 units per console. With Nintendo continuing to soar on its home-grown titles, while indies profit from its digital store.

Total revenue from dedicated games consoles continued to make up the vast majority of Nintendo’s earnings, with ¥741,909m (£5.45bn) out of ¥769,524m (£5.65bn).