Switch sales pass 132m as Nintendo stays silent on successor
Pikmin 4 top game in the series.
Nintendo's Switch console has now passed 132m units sold, but the company is remaining silent on its successor.
According to Nintendo's latest report detailing sales over the last financial quarter, Switch sales are still going strong. Unit sales for the Switch family of consoles rose 2.4 percent year-on-year, with the OLED model the most popular. A further 4.69m Switch OLEDs were sold, as clearly players are willing to spend extra on the improved screen, or to simply upgrade from the older model.
On a conference call after the earnings release, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa refused to comment on plans for a Switch successor, despite rumours of a 2024 release.
"The Switch is different from past hardware," said Furukawa (thanks, Bloomberg). "It has the ability to give rise to different kinds of new demand."
The sales figures show the Switch is closing in on the Nintendo DS to become the company's top-selling console, but it's still some way behind the handheld's 154m sales.
In terms of software, Pikmin 4 has sold 2.61m units to become the top-selling game in the series. Japan is responsible for 1.36m of those sales, proving the series popularity in Nintendo's home country. Considering Pikmin 1 and 2 were released on the GameCube and Pikmin 3 was on the WiiU, both with considerably less hardware sales than the Switch, these figures aren't hugely surprising.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has now sold 19.5m units, up from 18m as reported back in August. It's the ninth best selling game on the console, but still behind the 31.15m of Breath of the Wild.
Nintendo stated sales of its Mario games have seen a boost following the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Between this and the DLC expansion, Mario Kart has sold a further 3.22m units so far this financial year. It remains comfortably the top Switch game with 57.01m units sold - that means 43 percent of Switch owners also have Mario Kart.
Digital sales accounted for 50.2 percent of total software sales, although the ratio of digital to overall sales declined compared to last year due to high physical sales of Tears of the Kingdom. It proves that while the digital market is growing for Nintendo, the biggest releases still sell well physically.
Nintendo has raised its annual profit forecast, which analysts believe is due to better-than-expected sales across its key franchises.
Overall, Nintendo's net sales were up 21.2 percent for the first half of the fiscal year at 796.2bn yen, while operating profit rose 27 percent to 279.9bn yen.