Which System Will Ship More Units in Calendar Year 2025 Worldwide: Switch 2 or PS5?

XtremeBG

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XtremeBG on 05 February 2026

CosmicSex said:

So basically a tie. Anyone brave enough to do a 2026 thread? I would gladly do some more GTA 6 sermons where I recount the miracles it is said to have performed. I can sprinkle them in throughout the year.

Which system will sell more in 2026: Switch 2 or PS5?

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Jumpin on 05 February 2026

Jumpin said:

Zippy6 said:

Yes if Switch 2 were to accomplish this it'd basically be doubling the previous record for fastest selling console of all time.

Sell-Through first 7 months (VGChartz):

Console	First 7 Month Sell-through
PS5	8.96m
PS4	8.16m
Wii	7.77m
Switch	6.33m
Xbox Series	4.98m
Xbox One	4.40m
3DS	4.25m
WiiU	2.97m

Worth noting that Switch and 3DS here don't include a holiday season because of the time they launched, if we extend for holiday season:

Switch first 10 months: 13.12m
3DS first 11 months: 12.55m

I fully expect Switch 2 can sell over the 8.96m of the PS5, especially with it having a separate launch and holiday sales boost in it's first 7 months and nd Nintendo seems to have been building up stock for quite some time, but the roughly 18m in sales it would probably need to outsell ps5 for the full calendar year is unthinkable.

It took the Switch 16 months to reach 18m sales (sell-through), Switch 2 isn't doing that in less than half the time.

That's a great point to bring up. If Switch 2 does win, it would be an unprecedented sales record... or PS5 had a very unexpected sudden decline.

Evidence does not point to Nintendo Switch pulling it off this year, not without some sort of a paradigm shift in production and adoption time. And I don't think there's been any indication that's happening.

It's worth noting that Sony routinely over-estimates PS5 projections. Last year PS5 fell 4.8 million units below projections. But even if (probably more than worst case scenario) they were off by such a high number, they would still sell considerably more than any console has done in 7 months.

Well...There you go!

Switch 2 pulled off an unprecedented sales record.

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Louie on 05 February 2026

I didn't expect the Switch 2 to actually win this. I thought its start would be slower. Over 17 million units in just over half a year on the market is absolutely crazy.

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Shadow1980 on 05 February 2026

Damn. That came down to the wire. Can't get much closer without it being a tie. Solid year for both systems. The Switch 2's absolutely monstrous debut & strong hold was a deciding factor.

Interestingly, the Switch 2 actually shipped fewer units in Q4 than the PS5, which allowed the PS5 to gain on it a good bit. It shipped 640k more in Q3 than the PS5, but about a million less in Q4, resulting in NS2 shipments for the second half of the year being about 360k less than the PS5. But that record-setting launch saw it ship about half a million more in just the month of June than the PS5 did in the entire first half of the year. Nintendo really wanted there to be no major shortages at launch, and they saw to just that. Not only was there enough supply for that amazing launch performance, but there was also enough to where it managed to avoid a big slowdown in Q3. In fact, Q3 was the best follow-up-to-launch quarter of any system going back at least to Gen 7. That 4.54M compares to 3.3M for the PS5 (Q1 2021), 3.1M for the PS4 (Q1 2014), 2.65M for the Wii (Q1 2007), 2.43M for the DS (Q1 2005), and 1.96M for the Switch 1 (Q2 2017).

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