Nintendo has announced that its brand new console, the Switch 2, has now sold over 10 million units in the first four months on sale. That makes it the most successful console launch ever by quite some margin. And the two flagship games, Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza have their own extraordinary figures to boast of.
The Switch 2, launched June 5 after a peculiar and obfuscated build-up, went on to sell an extraordinary 3.5 million units in just its first four days on sale. Now, obviously that number includes pre-orders that built up rather chaotically from April, on top of post-launch sales in the opening days, so will always be the most dramatic number. At the start of August, Nintendo revealed things were still going extremely well, with a total of six million Switch 2s sold in its first month. While numbers from rival console manufacturers are often more hazy, this fully confirms the hybrid gaming device as the most successful console launch ever, dwarfing the already impressive numbers of the original Switch, and beating the PS5 to 10 million sales by a full four months. Which is to say, the Switch 2 has sold twice as fast as Sony’s behemoth.
Come the latest financial filings from Nintendo, noting sales up to the end of September, the company reports that by September 30 it had sold a total of 10.36 million Switch 2s. Which is astonishing.
Meanwhile, Mario Kart World has nearly doubled its sales since its first month, with a total of 9.57 million copies sold (and that’s actually sold, rather than just shipped), while July 17’s Donkey Kong Bananza has shifted 3.49 million carts.
All these massive numbers have given Nintendo cause to increase its sales expectations for the end of the financial year. It was originally banking on 15 million Switch 2s sold by the Spring, but that hope has now been raised to 19 million. Even this may still be a cautious under-estimation, given we’re just now entering the holiday season—a time period most rival consoles deliberately launch directly into. On top of that, the Switch 2 has already sold for two more months after these reported numbers, and with Nintendo’s plan to flood the stores with stock for Christmas, “only” another 8.5 million units by March 2026 could easily be reached.
Nintendo also announced that it has sold 1.89 million more original Switches in the same time period, and a mind-blowing 61.56 million software sales across those six months. The Switch 2, with its relatively far smaller user-base, still sold 20.62 million games, although as you will note, three-fifths of that is made up of two games!
