Nintendo Switch 2 Sales Fall 37.4% in First Half, Company Keeps Forecasts
Nintendo sold 2.68 million more Switch 2 consoles in the three months ended 30 September 2026, taking its cumulative sold-in total to 26.35 million, according to Video Games Chronicle. "Sold-in" counts units shipped into shops, which is not the same as units bought by players.
The first half of Nintendo's current financial year, which runs from April to March, shows a steep drop from the console's first year. Switch 2 hardware sales fell 37.4% year on year to 6.49 million units. The original Switch fell 32.7% to 1.27 million units over the same period. Nintendo said its sales forecasts remain unchanged despite the declines.
Across its dedicated video game platform business, which covers the consoles and the games sold for them, sales dropped 15.3% year on year. Nintendo's income from intellectual property, meaning the money earned from its characters and franchises through films, licensing and other deals, rose 87.9%. Nintendo linked part of that rise to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
Game sales told a different story. Switch 2 game sales rose 18.8% year on year to 24.49 million units. Sales of games for the original Switch rose 6.8% to 65.73 million units. The three biggest Nintendo Switch 2 titles, according to the same source, were Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, with 8.81 million units, Rhythm Heaven Groove, with 2.89 million, and Splatoon Raiders, with 2.42 million.
Nintendo's investor data page puts cumulative Switch 2 software sales at 73.21 million units as of 30 September 2026.
Some earlier figures help set the scale. In June 2025, Reuters reported that Nintendo had sold more than 3.5 million Switch 2 units in the first four days after launch, and that the company had sold 152 million Switch devices overall. Reuters later reported that Nintendo sold 19.9 million Switch 2 units in the financial year ended 31 March 2026. In May 2026, the company forecast annual Switch 2 sales of 16.5 million units.
Video Games Chronicle also reports that Switch 2 is ahead of the original Switch and the PlayStation 5 by more than six million units when the comparison is aligned to each console's launch.
For anyone following the console market, the headline numbers are a mix. Hardware is down from the first year's rush, while software and the company's film and franchise income are up. Nintendo has not changed its forecasts, and the next set of figures will show whether the current sales pace holds.
