Nintendo Switch 2 Is Fastest-Selling Game Console of All Time (polygon.com) 45
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a roaring start. Early on Wednesday, Nintendo announced that it had sold 3.5 million units of its new console in just four days, making it Nintendo's fastest-selling console ever. In fact, this is likely the biggest console launch of all time -- by quite some margin. For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first seven weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in a little over two weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month. [...]
Nintendo has predicted it will sell 15 million Switch 2s during its current financial year. It's well on the way to that figure already, although Nintendo still faces the challenges of maintaining stock availability and extending this expensive console's reach past the first wave of early adopters. If Switch 2 hits its first-year target, it will join Nintendo's other fasters sellers over the first year on sale: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and the original Switch. Over the weekend, the Switch 2 beat the record for the "most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," according to TweakTown.
Nintendo has predicted it will sell 15 million Switch 2s during its current financial year. It's well on the way to that figure already, although Nintendo still faces the challenges of maintaining stock availability and extending this expensive console's reach past the first wave of early adopters. If Switch 2 hits its first-year target, it will join Nintendo's other fasters sellers over the first year on sale: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and the original Switch. Over the weekend, the Switch 2 beat the record for the "most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," according to TweakTown.
Re:Availability (Score:5, Informative)
The SOC is quite a bit more powerful than anything on any phones. Its roughly on par with the Nvidia RTX 3050.
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If the GPU was clocked at its full rated speed it might compete with a 3050 but to maintain cooling and battery life Nintendo underclocked it quite a bit.
Now because of the huge popularity of the console it will probably hit performan
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As for the money: I doubt it. It's a really well-crafted device once you get your hands on it, and remember that Nintendo didn't raise the price of the base console in response to the tariffs. They usually make a small profit on the consoles, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're taking a small loss this time for that reason.
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Heard it's more like a 1050Ti.
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Geekerwan's video about the Switch 2 was posted here last week https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] . With these specs he calculated the Switch 2 would be close to a GTX 750Ti (similar to Steam Deck's GPU) on handheld mode and close to a GTX 1050Ti on docked mode (so 30% of a RTX 4060 performance, according to techpowerup). That's x7.5 times the performance of the Switch 1 on handheld mode and x7 times on docked mode. CPU is not as good though, he expects it to be quite behind modern CPUs with a geekbench score of 500 in ST and 2800 in MT, compared to 1260 ST and 4300 in MT of Steam Deck's CPU but better than the Switch 1 which scores 167 ST and 481 MT.
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Their GPU benchmarks are extremely questionable: they make a lot of assumptions and fail to account for a lot of factors. There are so many such assumptions that they might as well have just made up numbers for where they guessed the performance might be.
Their CPU benchmarks aren't as bad, but they do assume that the A78AE and A78C will have identical clock-for-clock performance, despite the architectural difference (2x4 core clusters versus 1x8 core clusters, which matters for things like cache access) and
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It's an nVidia designed GPU, it's not going to be much better than their other offerings on a performance-per-watt perspective. Especially considering it's now a few generations behind.
It's an Ampere based GPU with 1536 CUDA cores at ~1GHz.
An RTX-3050 is the same architecture with 2560 cores and ~1.5GHz and twice the memory bandwidth.
It's a little bit smaller than a mobile 2050, with more, slower memory
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The entire Switch 2 also needs to run within the capacity of its 60W power adaptor, leaving room for charging.
An RTX-3050 has a TDP of 70W
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Doing a direct comparison between the mobile 2050 (which is Ampere) against the Switch 2's T239 (which is modified Ampere) while only accounting for the differences in core count and theoretical clocks ignores, among other things, the difference in GPU architecture (there was some backporting of features from newer GPU generations), the difference in memory bus width and clockspeed, the differences in power/voltage/temperature curves, the difference in API and OS overhead, the difference in DLSS model (the
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Yes you're right, the comparison is hard, the Switch 2 has a lower memory bandwidth compared to any discrete GPU.
Who knows how the shared memory latency and bandwidth sharing effects CPU and GPU performance
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The GPU is debatable. The ARM cores are old A78s locked to a fairly low clockspeed. In terms of design, Nintendo is leaving a lot of perf/watt on the table. Older designs are cheap and don't require the latest nodes to make them work.
Re:Availability (Score:5, Informative)
Show me a single modern phone that will use 20W of power using it's CPU+GPU capabilities. They are all much lower power, lower performance chips that will typically at most use 8W (think about this logically, you don't have a phone that has a heatsink and fan capable of dissipating that heat of the high performance parts used in the Switch 2).
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the original NES was released in 1985 at the price of $179.99, which inflation adjusted to today would be over $530. The SNES in the USA was released for $199.99 in August 1991, which inflation adjusted to today's price would be $470....
Yet, consider this [fandom.com] -- consoles used to get price cuts quickly. The SNES launched for $199, but the next year it was selling for $149, and then $99. Meaning, most people paid much less than launch price. On the other hand, the Switch never got a price cut, so in practice it was more expensive; expect the same for the Switch 2.
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Nintendo stopped dropping prices of consoles back in 2002. The Gamecube was the last console to get an official RRP drop beyond specials and discounts.
And why would they drop the price? If sales are maintained there's no reason to drop the price. Most people haven't paid less for consoles since console gaming went mainstream as most people bought the console at its original price, which makes sense as the point of discounts is to drive sales once sales have well and truly started to decline.
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The "phone SoC" is an Nvidia chip. if you haven't looked lately, Nvidia isn't that keen on making chips that aren't for the datacenter - even gaming PC GPUs are low priority for Nvidia. So Nvidia isn't making chips up the wazoo for Nintendo - likely they agreed to a certain amount of chips and Nvidia will make just that amount and nomore, preferring to make AI datacenter chips instead.
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For what it's worth, NV is allegedly supplying chipsets to Nintendo at a cost of around $150 per unit. That's a significant step up from the cheap tx1 garbage that went into the original Switch.
Unlike MS and Sony that sell consoles at a loss, Nintendo always insists that their hardware generate a net profit.
Not surprising.... (Score:3)
I guess the only surprising things might be how quickly it sold out in the USA. Japan was almost certain to sell out, given the pre-order "disasters". But the USA selling out typically being Nintendo's largest market was not as certain. That said, the backwards compatibility and essentially upgrades to 4K+HDR capabilities, was pretty certain that it would be a good seller, even at the higher price point than people had been originally anticipating (I believe fans were hoping for a $350-400 range, but given that it has essentially sold out within 2-3 days of launch across the country at $450, it shows the market could support that price).
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it has plenty of room for price cuts. nintendo is actually selling the "japan only" version (a region-locked version with the menus in japanese only), for USD 100 less in Japan. it's japanese-only to avoid japan tourists (37M of them in 2024, and with 2025 going to surpass it) from buying it at the lower price in Japan.
fans knew this, they bitched about it, and here they are, buying the console like crazy.
oh and games for it are now $90.
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The SNES games were $59.95 at launch, which inflation adjusted would be $140. Even PS2 games which were DVD based stamps (i.e. much cheaper to make than NES/SNES/N64 cartridge style) were $50 - $59 at launch, which is still $90
Re: Not surprising.... (Score:3)
most games are now digital downloads so no logistics, stocking, or dead inventory overheads
but ok if you want to justify corporations go ahead.
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Unfortunately the price does seem to have factored in tariff costs though, for the entire world. And being Nintendo they will never discount it over its lifetime. At best some retailers might offer small sales, but it's not going to come down to pre-tariff levels.
That's the problem with inflation. It is pretty much permanent. Rarely do you see deflation, and never on the scale of the price hikes we get every time there is a once-in-a-lifetime economic disaster like 2008, 2010, the pandemic, the tariffs etc.
One caveat (Score:2)
I guess itâ(TM)s a good economy after all (Score:1)
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Must be if people can go spend money on a new gaming device.
What is an economy? I have spare money, so I guess poor people don't exist right? Pointing to a single product (which happens to also be the cheapest product on the market) as a sign of the general state of the economy is really really dumb.
What's the point in these numbers? (Score:2)
"... in just four days"
You know, including the months of pre-orders.
They're probably counting wholesale sales too. Like Walmart bought 1 million, but half of them are still on the shelves or in trucks on their way to stores.
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All the previous consoles they're comparing to would have been in the same boat.
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Except the PS5 had supply chain issues limiting how many they could ship.
The Switch2 launch was delayed to stockpile hardware. It was pushed 6 months
They had over 2 million pre-orders in Japan alone.
If there were 5 million PS5's available at launch, they probably would have sold out, instead it was a year or so before you could go to a store and see them in stock. It was quite a disaster. Launching a year into a global pandemic that disrupted global semiconductor manufacturing and logistics doesn't make for
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Like Walmart bought 1 million, but half of them are still on the shelves or in trucks on their way to stores.
Nope. All of Walmart's sales are accounted for. They had more preorders than Walmart was able to provision. Anything in a truck is still filling a pre-order and their shelves are empty.
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and their shelves are empty
And not just the consoles. I was expecting the games to be easy to find, but I was in a Walmart the other day and they were completely sold out of every Switch 2 game. I don't know if that's true everywhere, but that really took me by surprise.
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Great. So they didn't limit pre-orders to what they could actually deliver.
Amazing what happens (Score:2)
It's not bad (Score:2)