The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch (EDIT: See mod note in first post for new rule).

[Shadow1980]

eleazar0425 said:

ArtX said:

In April (Tomodachi) we will see. It might happen this year.

Yes, people are forgetting about this game, even though it's an absolute banger. I can see a lot of new Switch Lites being sold because of it. 

Unfortunately, there isn't a single case of a game released for a system that's been replaced bumping sales of that system by any significant amount. There have been a couple that moved a small amount of hardware. (EDIT: Technically broke my own rule using a non-Nintendo game on a non-Nintendo system as an example of software effects on hardware. My bad.). And while as mentioned the DS wasn't the GBA's replacement, by Q2 2006 the GBA had slowed down a lot and was averaging less than 10k a week, and while Mother 3 did triple sales from the prior week, that was only like 20k more units than the prior week. So, there is at least some precedent for a game being a system-seller that late into a system's life, but it's exceedingly rare and never results in any sort of huge, persistent sales bump.

However, the new Tomodachi Life game will also be on the Switch 2, and the last big cross-gen game, Pokemon Legends Z-A, boosted Switch 2 sales but not Switch 1 sales. If it does help we might see a few thousand extra Switch 1 units sold in Japan (where the series is most popular), which won't be enough to help the Switch reach any sort of big milestone.

Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 04 February 2026