Switch Ships 132.46 Million Units as of September 2023

[RolStoppable]

Slownenberg said:

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Uhhhh really weak second quarter numbers for TotK. Wasn't it at 18.51m before? So it only sold .99m that quarter? Damn that makes it seem like the game won't have legs at all. I expected it to sell like 3-4 million that quarter. I thought it would have passed 20m at latest by halfway through August. No way its gonna get close to BotW sales I guess. Though the fact that it has sold 3.5m in Japan already is pretty impressive. But that's gotta be pretty disappointing for Nintendo considering their evergreens usually sell ~1 million quarterly for a long time and a game as massive as TotK falls off to 1 million alread in its second quarter. Perhaps it'll still be able to hit 25m lifetime.

The game released during the middle of fiscal quarter 1 and had an extraordinary strong first week performance. Following that and considering the legs of other Nintendo heavy hitters, it's logical that retailers would stock up on plenty of physical copies. Now the game's legs didn't turn out to be as good as expected, so fiscal Q1 was inflated with plenty of physical copies still sitting on shelves. Fiscal Q2 is the correction for that.

This is similar to hardware shipments for holiday quarters which can be too high at times and are followed up by low hardware shipments in fiscal Q4. Tears of the Kingdom has remained in the top 15 of the European e-shop charts since its release, so digital sales have been steady; it's quite safe to assume that the same holds true in all other regions. But physical copies have caused a distortion of the true sales level, hence why I see no reason at all to doubt that TotK will hit at least 25m lifetime. The holiday quarter should push its LTD figure to over 21m already, so by the end of 2024 the game will have either cleared the 25m mark or be close to it. Switch games won't stop selling once the Switch successor has been launched.