You might be sitting on the fence about getting your hands on Nintendo’s new Switch console and you’re probably not the only one. A few folks felt they had been burned by the ill-fated Wii U so some hesitancy is understandable. But, if early sales figures for the Switch are any indication, it looks like Nintendo’s going to have a better round this time around.
Information, from Famitsu and market research company GfK by way of Superdata, says that the first week the Switch was on sale was a solid one, with over 1.5 million Switch consoles being sold around the world. The majority of sales went to the US and to Japan (500,000 and 360,000 respectively), with the UK (85,000) being edged out by France (110,000 units sold) for third place.
That’s a very solid showing for Ninty’s new hardware, made all the better by the fact that an estimated 1.34 million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have also been sold with those Switch consoles. That figure doesn’t include sales of the game on the Wii U, where it has also been released, but it does mean that approximately 89% of Switch buyers got a copy of Link’s latest outing to go with the new console.
Nintendo was hoping for 2 million consoles sold by the end of March, a target that they may have already reached. Sales figures are hard to track in real-time and the milestone may have been passed by now. The strong start will be heartening but the real decider for the console will be later game releases. The Wii U had potential as a console but a lack of decent releases prompted an early replacement of the hardware. We’re definitely hoping that’s not going to be the case here, based on our time with the Switch.
Which is a long way of saying: Stick around, because we’ve got a full Stuff review of both the Nintendo Switch console as well as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on its way. Preliminary reports are that both are awesome.
Source: Ars Technica, Gamesindustry