The Nintendo Switch, five years later by the numbers

The Nintendo Switch has enjoyed five years of success, and here are the numbers to prove it.

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The Switch is the ultimate union of handhelds and consoles, and as such, the system has generated tremendous profits for Nintendo. As the system turns five years old today we're taking a look back at some of the most important milestones the platform has achieved in half a decade.

• Nintendo has sold over 5.3 billion games in 38 years
• Nintendo has sold over 533 million handhelds in 33 years

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Nearly $60 billion revenues

In the last five years, the Switch has helped Nintendo generate nearly $60 billion in revenues. From March 2017 to December 2021, Nintendo made $59.8 billion in revenues. While those numbers do include 3DS hardware and software sales, the majority of those earnings were from the Switch itself.

Most of that revenue was from hardware. Nintendo made over $33 billion from hardware sales and over $26 billion from software sales, show just how important HW unit sales are for the company.

103.54 million units shipped

The Switch is Nintendo's 3rd best-selling console of all time (by sell-in, or shipments), second only to the Game Boy and the DS. The platform, which now includes three systems in the family, recently dethroned the Wii and should beat the Game Boy in 2022.

Nintendo has made a profit on every Switch console sold--hence the high revenues.

766 million games sold

Switch is a software monster. As per data provided by Nintendo, the company has sold 766.41 million video games on the Switch. Most of these were first-party game sales, too; Nintendo has earned over $21 billion from first-party game sales from the Switch's launch to present, as compared to $5 billion from third-party.

The Switch is Nintendo's 3rd top-selling system in software sales.

Nintendo is expected to launch a new Switch model sometime in 2024 that's capable of 4K gaming thanks to NVIDIA's DLSS technology.