Turns out that not even a hefty price tag, looming threats of tariffs, or the very basic fact that it literally only has one new (very fun, but very lonely) video game to its name can stop Nintendo’s Switch 2. The new video game machine (which, again, largely mostly plays the old video games, at least until that cool new Donkey Kong title comes out in like a month) has apparently just become the company’s best-selling video game system of all time, possibly on account of, damn, you have to have something fun to fiddle with these days, right?
Specifically, Nintendo announced earlier today that, in the first four days of availability, it had sold 3.5 million units of the new console, which builds on the hybrid “portable, but you can also stick it in your TV” success of the original Switch. (Itself the third-best-selling console of all time, trailing just a few million units behind Sony’s PlayStation 2, and the company’s own Nintendo DS.) This, despite a number of real-world disruptions to the fun, notably a period in which the company was no longer accepting preorders due to concerns over the United States’ Whack-A-Mole iteration of a tariff policy.
Analysts have noted that these numbers make the Switch 2 one of the fastest-selling video game consoles of all time, period: Sony’s PlayStation 5 didn’t hit these kinds of sales for weeks after its release, to pick one recent example. Notably, Nintendo has avoided some of the availability issues that frequently bedevil console launches; the company has apparently internalized the idea that one of the best ways to have a really successful console launch is to have enough consoles for everybody who wants one to buy it. God only knows, meanwhile, how many of these things they would have sold if they’d had two games ready to go on the market.
