The Game Boy Advance only had some three years on the shelves before the Nintendo DS came out, but managed to amass one of the best video game libraries of all time, sell 82M copies, and is still a top 10 best selling console of all time, 20+ years later. Three years.

What a f*cking warrior.

You could also use the argument that the PS2 was dirty cheaper for the 2nd half of its life at only 100$, which is a huge reason why it got to 160 Million, it was impulse buy cheap and its immediate successor had a disastrous launch priced at 600$ which is equivalent to 1000$ in 2025 inflation, so that forced many more potential consumers to buy the cheaper PS2.

The Switch didn't have any of those advantages, not only stayed at 300-350$ for the entirety of its life, the price would actually RISE during the time period where consoles would need a price cut the most which is towards the end of its lifecycle. This makes the Switch 1 not impulse buy cheap and has less of an advantage in that area, so despite that people still purchased it as much as the dirt cheap PS2 which is highly impressive and truly shows just how much stronger the appeal is for the Switch.

Then again ps2 also didnt have the social media advantage.

Nor the covid advantage.

Also it didnt had a cheaper handheld only mode that people count as a " switch" sale even thou its a deticated handheld and it cant" switch" 

And before you give the argument of" but it plays all the switch games"

So did the ps2 play all the ps1 games 

The switch in todays time is " dirt cheap" its 299 against 550 ps5.

Its a verry easy impulse buy if you low on money. Or have a family

What i mean to say is verry simple,they both had some advantage of why they sold crazy amount of units.

If it matches it going forward it'll end up at almost exactly 159m though with the forecast adjustment I don't see it shipping 2m this holiday so it should be further behind by the end of the fiscal year. The estimates are actually very reliable in this case since the DS's final sales total and shipments for each quarter are known alongside the date from Famitsu and whatnot. With the Switch and Switch 2 only needing to be adjusted slightly in response to this quarter it's quite reliable for current consoles too with the possible exception of the Xbox Series due to a relative lack of data for that one.

The Xbox One's final total was originally at 50.5m on here but then it was randomly revealed to be 58m some time later so the Xbox Series could be a couple to few million off. Though even if that happens the current estimates will still be close enough that the overall picture will stay the same so the estimates even for that are still valuable.

My guess would be by Holidays 2027, the Wii sold another 5 to 6 million after dropping to around 500K per quarter, the Switch is at 900K and has higher support now than the Wii did at that phase.

This is if things go business as usual. There’s always the opportunity for price drops or new models.

I've now updated the OG post, with a comparison table of the shipment numbers of both consoles, you can look at this there, and also added total lifetime table for the PS2 as well as some extra info under the tables which you can take a look at. When you look at the comparison table of the shipments, it looks like everything is in favor of the Switch. It's still doing shipments near the 1M mark each quarter, and on top of that it's lifetime difference is 20M+ as of this moment. The last quarter ending in September, was the same quarter ending in September for the 2008 year for the PS2 which was at 133.4M at this time, more than 20M behind Switch latest number of 154M. Also we barely passed the point (looking at lifetime) where Switch was at the top of it's difference with the PS2 at 24M advantage in the end of 2023. It's difference is now dropping, but it only dropped less than 4M for 2 years, and if you look at it from this side, it looks like it's impossible that difference to drop to 0 or even in the minus (which will be the case if it doesn't reach the 160M in the end). Irony of ironies: the two most successful consoles, the PS2 and the Switch, launched almost on the same day - March 4th and March 3rd respectively - making them a perfect fit for period-based comparisons, including fiscal years and of course sales.