The Nintendo Switch closes in on a major milestone

The Switch is on track to complete a major milestone for Nintendo this year. As of the end of 2024, the Nintendo Switch has sold over 150 million units in the eight years since its release. That’s an impressive number, and yet… that’s still not enough to make it the company’s best selling piece of hardware — a distinction that belongs to the humble Nintendo DS — but it’s getting close.

The company released its earnings report earlier this week, and the numbers don’t look great. Though hardware sales are down a whopping 30 percentage points compared to 2023, Nintendo has, predictably, taken an optimistic stance. After all, this console is eight years old with the Switch 2 tantalizingly close to launch. And in light of all that, it still sold almost 10 million units. But that impressive 150 million unit total is still a bit short of the massive 154 million units the Nintendo DS sold in its 12-year lifetime. Bolstered by recent games like The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and with new games like Metroid Prime 4 and Pokémon Legends: Z-A on the horizon, it’s likely that the Switch will finally overtake the DS this year, making it Nintendo’s best selling console ever.

After that, there’s one more boss for the console to beat before it can be called the best-selling console of all time — the 160 million units of the PlayStation 2.