What do you mean?

The Atlanic Ocean separates the European and African continents (Noth- and South Atlantic) from the American contintent (North-, Middle- and South America) with a maximum width of 6,400 km/3,977 mi (between Florida and Senegal). The English Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Southern England from northern France. It varies in width from 240 km/149 mi at its widest to 34 km/21 mi at its narrowest in the Strait of Dover.

Two years ago the whole Atlantic Ocean stood between the Switch and PS2 to catch up, now only the English Channel remains in distance. Final spurt!

@Roma Pikmin 4 has managed almost 3.48m as of March 2024 and is probably close to 4m by now. I'd say that's really solid though, considering how it launched late in Switch's life. Could maybe reach 5m in its lifetime. It's definitely a record for Pikmin (to be fair, every other numbered entry initially launched on a low-selling system).

Can't speak too much on Dread & Prime, but at least Dread is the best selling Metroid game, I believe. Prime probably could've done better if it was launched during the holidays and wasn't shadow-dropped.

Pikmin & Metroid are just niche franchises, but Pikmin 4 has done well and Prime 4 should do well too.

Interesting observation to point out: Among 2017 releases, it was BotW which out-legged Mario Odyssey (despite having had the larger launch). Among 2023 releases, it seems to be Mario Wonder which is out-legging TotK (despite having had the larger launch). Wonder why that is? Maybe the overall gaming market has less of an appetite for massive open world games? Maybe Mario has simply grown more in popularity over the Switch gen — having MK8D, Mario Movie, etc. — than Zelda, hence is better as an evergreen?

I wouldn't be surprised if, when all is said and done, Switch Sports ends up in the top 10 best selling Switch games, it's legs are crazy good, 1.37m in a quarter over two years post-release.

Interestingly enough, Mario Odyssey has been slowing catching up to BOTW recently; this quarter it closed the gap by 410k.

With a total gap of 3.58m though, Odyssey may not catch up before they both reach their final tally.

Generation defining launch/early games traditionally sell better than their sequels or successors. For Zelda... OoT doubled Majora's Mask's sales, Twilight Princess almost tripled Skyward Sword, and BotW will probably beat TotK by a good margin.

I haven't been paying close attention to Nintendo's software, but Odyssey shrinking the gap with BotW can partly be attributed to TotK cutting BotW's legs.

You should look into Pierre485 on Twitter. His page is filled with all sorts of statistics comparing all the big Nintendo software. (also, yeah, according to what i found on his page, it does look like BotW was breaking away from SMOdyssey all the way up until TotK came and slashed the legs. Now, it’s looking like it may be a toss up LTD btwn the two.)

I wonder what the legs will be like on the switch evergreens going into the switch 2. I feel like a lot of these games will continue selling decently throughout the switch 2s life, with them all being available day 1 on switch 2 digitally, something that we have never really had on a Nintendo successor in the past.

Well Mario Wonder is a brand new Mario game (by which I mean not part of an old series), and previously the Switch had only gotten a WiiU Mario port of Mario.

Meanwhile TotK is a direct sequel to a Zelda that came out on Switch. Given that they both use the same (though altered) map, and yeah probably let's throw in the fact that plenty of people might not be up for another 200+ hr game that is very similar to the previous Zelda on the same system, I think these things can account for Mario Wonder having stronger legs than TotK.

I mean, I bought TotK, but I probably won't even get around to starting it for a couple more years just because taking on another 200+ hour game is just a daunting task as an adult, meanwhile I started playing Mario Wonder the day I bought it.

The most shocking thing is that Mario Wonder didn't skyrocket past NSMBUD. If anything I think that speaks to the fact that gamers are pretty saturated with Mario on Switch after Odyssey, Maker 2, NSMBUD, 3D All-Stars, 3D World, and finally Wonder. But still the fact that Wonder is a "new" Mario experience and only the second one on the system, and the first 2D one, that I guess beats out the fact that TotK is such a direct sequel to BotW. Nintendo probably would have been better off spending all the time making complicated new mechanics in TotK on just crafting a brand new world for it. I think that would have resulted in higher sales, given that BotW is all about exploration. A stronger pitch that I think would have resulted in stronger continued sales for TotK would have been "explore a brand new Zelda world and improvements over BotW gameplay", rather than what they did which was basically "spend another couple hundred hours going over the same world but we made some new areas and there's a amazing building mechanic". New world and improving the formula I think would have produced higher sales than same world with changes plus one crazy new mechanic. In which case maybe TotK would be legging better than Wonder.

The interesting thing about TOTK is that in Japan it sold around as much as BOTW, if the ratio was the same outside Japan for TOTK it would have sold over 30 million already.