US Sales: November 2025 (Circana)

[Sephiran]

Otter said:

Sephiran said:

I mean, Nintendo IP and Nintendo games are expected to be among the bigger games in the industry, or you mean to tell us that in a span of a few months, Nintendo IP has gone from being incredibly popular to now be less popular than Oblivion and Expedition 33? Have you seen how much software Nintendo has sold over the decades of just their own first party games?

This is when we come back to software, all the big holiday Switch 2 releases are Switch 1 games. 

For families especially, cross gen is just a reason not to upgrade. Only the most core gamers will care about resolution differences etc. For now I think people are comfortable with S1 outside of those eager to be early adopters, so same early adopters don't need to wait for the holiday for such an available system. But anyway I do agree with Louie that this is a whole lot of fuss over a soft november and we should wait to see a bigger pattern over the holidays and eventually the new year. 

I'm just projecting my feeling that the despite the system having hype at launch I don't think is a need amongst the general public to upgrade and price is not going to change that. 

Its true that early sign shows that Switch 2 is selling less in the US now that early adopters have gotten it, and families are less prone to buy it this holiday, which led to a smaller than usual holiday boost. Some of it could be software related, but much of it is outside Nintendo's hands, we already have real statistics about US consumers themselves saying that they will spend less money this holiday compared to last holiday. Nintendo is obviously not immune to general consumers spending less money this holiday than usual. Consoles are a luxury and not a necessary item to buy. If that consumer reality continues into 2026, Nintendo has very limited ability to change that, even if they launch more appealing software, that will still mostly have a marginal effect unless consumer demand itself gets an upswing the coming months and years. Consoles used to be more immune to economic downturns, but now console gaming is just one part of the gaming industry, consumers can spend a lot on gaming and never have to get a console these days, while previously consoles were a dominant part of gaming which meant consoles were more immune from economic downturns, because people still wanted to play games even in bad economic times and buying a console was the natural endpoint to that wish back then. That isn't the case at all today with mobile, PC and forever games dominating the industry.

Last edited by Sephiran - on 22 December 2025