Nintendo recently launched their newest, highly anticipated console, the Nintendo Switch. And just last Friday, millions of people (thanks to the magic of pre-order) finally got their hands on a Switch device. If there’s one thing we know about YouPorn viewers, it’s that they love their video games as much as they love their porn. However, to the dismay of many YouPorn viewers, the Switch launched without a web browser- so while millions of YP viewers turned to the site in search of some Nintendo-related-relief, others fell of the face of the earth for the weekend to test drive the Switch. We teamed up with Mass Appeal and here’s what we found.

Thanks to our anonymized interest data provided by our analytics software, we are able to identify site users based on their various interests, including gaming preferences. This allows us to offer-up more insights on how and why our site is affected. Let’s start by looking at overall “Gamer” traffic to the site. Throughout the month you can see small traffic fluctuations from one day to the next. This is quite typical, as any event or holiday (no matter how big or small), even a TV series finale or movie premiere would affect traffic to our site. What is interesting is that you can see a very significant dip in traffic among Gamers over the weekend of March 3rd. Beginning on Friday- the day the Switch launched, traffic dropped -15%, -17% on Saturday and -13% on Sunday. The lowest numbers all month. Although the sales numbers aren’t out yet, Japan is estimated to have sold more than 330,000 units. While in the America’s it is being said that over the first two days of sales, the new console is already beating out all other systems in the company’s history. Which would explain the dip in Gamer traffic to YouPorn.

We also took a deeper dive into different Gamer Affinities, to see which experienced the largest drop in traffic. “Gamers” in general dropped by -17%, followed by “Hardcore gamers” and “social gamers” at -10% each. Nothing surprising here, these are the affinities you’d expect to be intrigued by the launch, and would obviously leave the site to test the new console. What is surprising however is that “Adventure & Strategy” & “Action” only dropped by 5%. It’s surprising because the most anticipated and talked about game that launched with the Switch is Zelda– a strategy/action game, one would think gamers in these categories would be quick to put down the porn and pick up a console.

Finally, our usual suspect, Top Related Searches. Sorry to burst your bubble but nothing too funny or dirty this time around. Seems as though gamers like to keep it simple, “Link” and “Zelda” had the highest increase in searches over the weekend. “Link” up 164%, while searches for “Zelda” were up 102%. “Nintendo” searches went up by 37%, and searches for some of the system’s OG characters like “Mario”, “Bowser” and “Princess Peach” increased by 24%, 23% and 16% (respectively).

Want to know more about YouPorn’s gamer group, read more here and here.