Switch game sales hit 456 million, will dethrone NES, Game Boy in 2021

Nintendo has sold 456.49 million Switch games to date across a library of 710 games, the company recently announced.

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There's lots of good news in Nintendo's recent Fiscal Year Q2'21 earnings report. Hardware is up to an all-time Q2 high of 6.86 million unit sales, and total games earnings are up to $3.67 billion. Software, however, is a more interesting trend.

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Nintendo sold 49.82 million Switch games in Q2 FY2021, up 39% from last year. This brings first half software sales (Q1-Q2 FY2021) to a massive 100.25 million game sales, which eclipses the year-ago period by 41.76 million sales.

As they normally do, first-party games made up 81.2% of software sales in Q2, or roughly 40.45 million. The Switch remains the fifth best-selling Nintendo platform for games.

Digital made up 38.9% of total game sales volume, or 19.37 million. 1H'21 digital sales are up an astronomical 139% YoY to 171.5 billion yen ($1.62 billion). This is a big metric that benefits Nintendo tremendously thanks to direct purchases and revenue shares from third-party titles.

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Digital sales earnings hit 70.4 billion yen ($664.40 million) in Q2, up a whopping 72% year-over-year.

This push towards digital reflects COVID-19 lockdowns and preference from consumers who are increasingly adopting downloads as their primary access point for games.

The Switch won't slow down, either. The critical Q3 holiday period is expected to spike both hardware and software, and COVID-19 trajectories have given Nintendo extreme confidence in the platform.

Nintendo just upgraded its Switch software forecast and now expects to sell 170 million Switch games this fiscal year.

This means by March 31, 2021, Nintendo expects Switch software to hit 535.24 million. That would put Switch game sales above NES and Game Boy, making the Switch the third best-selling platform insofar as software purchases.

This is no small feat, and we could see the forecast being propped up by the rumored Switch Pro console slated for early 2021.

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