This discussion came up before, had an old table about this I've just updated with the previous fiscal year.
Best case scenario for Third Party on Switch is that they're responsible for 54.5% of software sales, in reality it will be less than this as explained by the ^ comment in the image. PlayStation software over the past 6 fiscal years third party has been responsible for 83.5% of software sales.
So Switch users making a game purchase are generally pretty 1:1 on whether they buy either a first party or third party games, whereas on PlayStation it's more like 4:1 in favour of third party.
If we use these percentages and the tie ratio for the consoles we get the following:
The average PS4 user has purchased 10.1 third party games and 2 first party games.
The average Switch user has purchased 4.65 third party games and 3.9 first party games.
But Switch users are still buying a decent amount of third party games even if the percentage share is much less. There's more to be said about the distribution of third party sales. PlayStation get's multiple third party titles release every year that will sell over 5m copies on the platform, the same cannot be said for Switch. Switch users do buy third party titles but these sales are more spread over many AA and Indie titles. The Switch does not get AAA third party system sellers bar the occasional title like Monster Hunter Rise. A 10m third party seller on a Nintendo platform is practically unheard of. So it's more the big blockbusters that give this perception. Either Nintendo doesn't get them (CoD, RDR2, GTAV, Cyberpunk, AC, Elden Ring) or it gets an inferior version that sells worse (Fifa, Hogwarts).
Last edited by Zippy6 - on 14 January 2024
