The Switch is Nintendo’s best-selling console — and its most transformative
Nintendo has seen many highs during its few decades in the video game industry. Popularizing home consoles with the NES, introducing games to new audiences with the motion controls of the Wii and the touchscreen Trojan horse that was the Nintendo DS, to name a few. But these successes were often followed by missteps; the Wii sold 100 million units, while its follow-up, the Wii U, couldn’t even manage a quarter of that. But this precariousness seems to be changing. The Switch is now Nintendo’s best-selling console, surpassing the DS with 155 million units sold since its debut in 2017. And over that time, Nintendo has transformed itself into a company better protected against the ever-changing vagaries of the video game industry.
One of the key factors in the Switch’s success was how it represented a more unified version of Nintendo. In 2013, the company merged its two main game development divisions, previously divided into home console and handheld groups. Given that the Switch straddled the line between console and handheld, this made a lot of sense. But it also allowed Nintendo to put the full power of its creative resources behind a single platform. The result was a series of massive hits: games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildAnd Super Mario Odyssey all sold more than 30 million copies.
Just as importantly, this structure allowed Nintendo to release big games consistently throughout the Switch’s lifespan. Even though the focus was on the next console, the final years of the Switch still included brand new consoles. Zelda And Super Mario games. The structure also allowed Nintendo to seamlessly continue this success with the launch of the Switch 2, which got off to a very fast start and debuted alongside an all-new Mario Kartwhich was followed by Donkey Kong And Metroid.
But apart from games, which constitute the core of the company, Nintendo has also taken advantage of the success of the Switch to gradually diversify in new directions. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. movie. released in theaters, made over a billion dollars, and now Nintendo has both a sequel and a live-action Zelda movie on the way. Nintendo opened its first theme park in Japan in 2021 and has since expanded to Hollywood and Florida, with an upcoming location in Singapore. The company even opened its own museum in 2024. In essence, Nintendo is building an entertainment empire. Its competitors are more and more numerous, such as Disney and Netflix in addition to Xbox and PlayStation. “I think people think of Nintendo as a games company,” Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s chief executive, told me in 2023. “But we’ve always thought of ourselves as an entertainment company.”
It’s not a completely unique strategy: almost every video game company hopes to break into film and television after the success of projects like The last of us, To fallAnd A Minecraft movie. But in Nintendo’s case, the company seems to understand how precarious success like the Switch can be, and it has used that success to gradually expand into something bigger, in a deliberate and concerted way. This is something Nintendo has tried to do before – see: the company’s ill-fated efforts in mobile gaming – but its resurgence in the Switch era has allowed it to approach these projects with a new level of focus and ambition. It’s a company so confident that it’s about to release a $100 recreation of the Virtual Boy, one of its biggest failures.
But the new Switch doesn’t need to match the success of its predecessor either: it simply needs to allow Nintendo to continue this momentum.
