The Nintendo Switch Has Likely Outsold The Wii U In Just 10 Months

Nintendo predicted this would happen, and it seems likely it may be a reality; the Switch has almost certainly outsold the entire four year lifespan of the Wii U in its first year. In its first ten months, to be specific.

While Nintendo will not officially release this information for a little while yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, Ace Research Institute is projecting that the company sold 7 million Switches around the world in the October to December holiday window.

If that’s accurate, that would mean that the Switch sold 14.6 million units by year’s end after its March 2017 launch. That also means that yes, Nintendo has outsold the entire 2012-2016 run of the Wii U its very first year, as that console only moved 13.56 million units before it was discontinued.

That speaks to both how poorly the Wii U sold and how successful the Switch has been. The Wii U was one of the worst-selling consoles in recent history, a dramatic downgrade from the worldwide fad that was the Wii, and its poor sales caused Nintendo to continually revise their forecasts downward after constantly over-estimating how well it would sell.

The Switch, meanwhile, is on pace to be one of the best-selling consoles in history, if it can keep this momentum up. It’s already the fastest selling console in the US and Canada ever, and it seems to be inching just ahead of the pace of the current market leader, PS4, which sold 14.4 million units in its first year of release, where the Switch may have surpassed that in its first ten months.

The first year of the Switch does seem to be somewhat front-loaded, as two its two biggest titles, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey both feel like once-in-a-generation games to a certain extent. And yet, there’s still a lot on the horizon for the Switch between the announced Metroid Prime 4 and the unannounced-but-inevitable Mario Kart and Smash Bros. games for the Switch. Additionally, the Switch will have something that no other Nintendo home console has had before it, a fully-fledged Pokémon game as Nintendo leaves the 3DS behind. That alone may outsell literally everything else on the system, if all goes well, and should keep the Switch a hot commodity for years to come.

It may be the case that Nintendo actually raises their forecast for Switch sales if it’s been over-performing their expectations so far. Right now, the company is saying that it will sell 16.7 million units by the end of March, which will be just over a year of sales, and past the current metric set by PS4 this generation.

The Switch continues to impress both players and the market itself. It’s hard to see when its momentum will slow down at this point, as it seems like we’re looking at an all-time great piece of hardware here.

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