Following the massive disaster that was the Nintendo Wii U, not many believed that the Nintendo Switch could ever become one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time, and this has been steadily turning into a reality.
Not long ago, in fact, we reported that the handheld hybrid had already managed to sell over 55 million units, and becoming Nintendo's third best-selling home console.
For further reference, the Nintendo Wii is the company's best selling console with an impressive 101.63 million units in lifetime sales, while the Nintendo Entertainment System comes in second place with 61.91 million units sold; a place that it no longer holds.
As revealed by Nintendo's recently shared results for the second quarter of the fiscal year ending March, 2021, the Nintendo Switch family of systems has sold a total of 12.53 million units year-on-year. Specifically, this means that Nintendo Switch sold 8.36 million units, and the Nintendo Switch Lite sold an impressive 4.17 million units.
When we add this 12.53 million to the 55.77 million Nintendo Switch systems were sold as of March of 2020, which is almost exactly three years since the console was released back in 2017, the result reveals that over 68.3 million units have been sold since the popular system's launch.
Back in May, when Nintendo officially revealed the previous financial report, we predicted that the Nintendo Switch would quickly catch up to the number of Nintendo Entertainment System units sold, but that it would still be a while before it manages to become Nintendo's best-selling home console.
Now, we must include the Nintendo DS here too, since the Nintendo Switch is also considered to be a handheld. For those who my not remember, the Nintendo DS is the company's best-selling console, and the second best-selling console of all time with 154.02 million units sold; trailing behind Sony's best-selling PlayStation 2.
The Nintendo Switch will soon be entering its fourth year in the market, and there are quite a number of heavy hitting titles that are expected to be released for the popular console in the near future, such as the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metroid Prime 4, so hardware sales can only go up from here.