Nearly 25% of Nintendo's total 6 billion lifetime game sales were made on the Switch

Nintendo's latest Q3'26 results have unlocked big sales milestones for both hardware and software.

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Gaming's biggest companies are starting to report their holiday results, and for Nintendo, sales were good. Over the Holiday 2025 period, the company made new sales records as the Switch lineup officially beat the DS and became the best-selling Nintendo video games hardware of all time.

On the software front, Nintendo likewise broke new ground by announcing it has sold over 1.5 billion games cumulatively on the Switch family of consoles. Based on the data, Nintendo has now sold over 6 billion games across all of its systems, from the earliest NES and Famicom days to the modern Switch 2 era. To be more exact, Nintendo has sold around 6.095 billion games both digitally and physically over the multiple decades that it's been in the interactive entertainment business. Quick math shows that roughly 24.6% of Nintendo's total game sales were made on the Switch platform. That share bumps to 25% if we combine sales made on both the Switch (1,500.16 million) and the Switch 2 (37.93 million).

• Read more: Switch beats DS to become Nintendo's best-selling video games hardware of all time

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The Switch 2, which has already outsold the failed Wii U, is nearing 40 million software sales after just 3 quarters on the market. The platform is also at roughly 1/3rd of the way to the Wii U's lifetime software sales of 103.6 million, of which a portion would be from digital-based purchases like classic games from the Virtual Console.

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Remember that these numbers do not technically represent the full extent of Nintendo's software reach--the company has released a variety of mobile games, including the popular Fire Emblem Heroes. This has proven to be a lucrative, if not ancillary branch of its business, and Nintendo has generated nearly $2.2 billion from smartphone games altogether since it launched its first mobile title.

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