UPDATE: Latest Profile (January Year 4)

Hi everyone, the highly anticipated last week of 2020 was just updated. With it, I bring you the December Year 4 profile for the Nintendo Switch:

Key Highlights:

1) Switch sold an estimated 28.26M consoles in 2020 (up 47% from 2019) 

2) The Switch surpassed the 3DS lifetime totals this month

3) No console on record has sold more than the Switch during the Aug-Dec period of their fourth year.

4) Switch has a 1.3M Gap advantage over the PS5 month aligned.

5) Only the DS and Wii had a better year 4 holidays.

6) The switch is up 20% this December compared to last year.

7) Next month the Switch will try to surpass the 1.6M it sold last January.

8) If the switch is able to hold a steady increase vs last year, then it could target the 1.9M record set by DS year 4.

9) The highest year 4 is held by DS (27.9M) the Switch needs 2.3M in January + February to beat that record.

bonus questions:

a) Will the NS be able to sell over 1.9M units during January 2021?

Continuing with  this analysis, here is the Month aligned race between the NS and the DS.

This race is absolutely close, both lines seem to be merging.

Some highlights of this race:

1) The DS currently leads by 1.18M units.

2) The DS sold 1.9M units on January Year 4, so the Switch has to surpass this in order to shrink the gap.

3) On December year 4 the DS sold 6.3M units compared to the 6.0M units of the NS.

4) During Year 4 the Switch has beaten the DS during 4 of the 10 months.

5) During Year 4 The Switch is 1.3M units ahead of the DS

6) The Switch has currently sold 25.6M units in year 4, it needs 2.3M more during the months of January+February in order to beat the DS.

Monster Hunter Rise should give the Switch another boost this year. And in the near future, games like the Breath of the Wild Sequel and Metroid Prime 4, along with still unannounced titles, and other minor games should help it to keep selling.

I'm curious to see how far the Switch can reach.

Really interesting. Switch didn't reach 30 millions but 28.3 is an incredible number. I feel like this year was pretty overwhelming that we didn't really realize but like only Wii and DS achieved such highs. Let's see how much it can stabilize in 2021. I feel like Jan + Feb should be up. Switch was out of stock pretty much all spring and summer last year and some weeks were pretty weak. So there is faith it could still catch up if Nintendo is aggressive enough. It will be very interesting.

If it can keep up with 2020, the Switch will enter DS/PS2 territory and would probably end higher than 145 millions.

Hi @xMetroid  You are absolutely right, it is easy to overlook such an incredible accomplishment for the Switch. It is true that the Wii beat the Switch this december, but Year 4 for the Wii was 19M compared to the 28.3M of the Switch. The best 12 consecutive months for the Wii was 24M. The best year of the PS2 seems to be 22M. While the best 12 months for the DS are 29.5M

There is a very slight chance that the Switch could outsell the past January and February by 1.2M in order to tie the DS (it would need 3.8M units in two months)

The Gap charts with the Wii are very interesting as well:

During all of the past 9 months the NS just blasted upwards, this December seems to me like the Last hurrah for the Wii, the final battle that they just put everything they got in order to try and survive. But after this, I find it hard to think that the Wii will have many months that it can outsell the NS. Maybe January (1.5M) but not much more after that. 

Here are the Year 4 and 5: