The Nintendo Switch has sold close to 20M units, but what does that mean? Nintendo is making another play for the mainstream

In its latest quarterly earnings report, Nintendo announced that it has sold 19.67 million units of the Nintendo Switch as of June 30, 2018. That number may not mean much without some context behind it, but the short version of this story is that Nintendo’s hybrid portable/console is doing very well for the company.

We’re going to compare the Nintendo Switch’s sales to sales of the PlayStation 4 — and explain why that’s an imperfect comparison a bit later — to try to get some idea of how the Switch is doing in the marketplace.

Sony’s own numbers indicate that it had sold 73.6 million units of the PS4, this generation’s best-selling console, worldwide through Dec. 31, 2017. That means that Sony has sold approximately 18.4 million units per year since the PS4’s launch. That’s a very rough estimate — and it assumes that sales have been uniform since the console’s debut in November 2013 — but it gives us some idea of what the market leader looks like in terms of raw sales.

This tweet from GoNintendo puts things in even better perspective, and suggests that the Switch is selling as well as, or better than, the PS4 at this point in its lifespan:

But there are more reasons to think that the Switch could best the PS4’s sales in the long term. Players know how they’re going to interact with it, and outside of families upgrading into a PlayStation 4 Pro, there are few reasons to think there will be more than one PS4 per household.

Nintendo, meanwhile, has been open about the idea that families can, and very well may, buy more than one Switch.

“The marketing strategy going forward is to instill a desire to purchase Nintendo Switch among a wide consumer base in all the regions of Japan, the US, and Europe,” Nintendo creative fellow Shigeru Miyamoto stated earlier this year. “Our ultimate ambition is for a Nintendo Switch to be owned not just by every family, but by every single person.”

What is the Switch competing against?

This is the question that comes up when we try to give some context to the hardware sales numbers. The Switch is not a traditional console, and it doesn’t feel like a handheld. You can’t put it against smartphones, for example, because it doesn’t also include necessary functions such as making calls, texting or taking pictures.

Comparing sales of the Switch to the PS4 might give us the best general yardstick to put Nintendo’s numbers into perspective, due to Sony being the current market leader in console sales. But it’s nowhere near an apples-to-apples comparison.

In truth, Nintendo is mostly competing against itself. Since its March 2017 launch, the Switch has already surpassed the lifetime sales of the Wii U and GameCube. Nintendo has released nine of the top 10 best-selling games for the Nintendo Switch to date, meaning that Nintendo is able to compete with Sony in hardware sales while remaining its own best developer and publisher.

And all this is happening before the launch of the latest Smash Bros. title, and before we have any solid information about a mainline Pokémon game for the Switch. There’s no reason to believe that hardware sales are going to slow, and new buyers this year and during the holiday season will undoubtedly want to pick up the existing Mario and Zelda titles for the system, too. Nintendo’s short-term outlook is pretty impressive, despite the likelihood that the Switch will ultimately cannibalize the company’s 3DS business.

Nintendo created a new market category, and is reaping the rewards. The Nintendo Switch isn’t a gimmick, and sales aren’t limited to existing Nintendo fans. The success of the hardware has proven that there are no rules on the path to mainstream acceptance.