The numbers are in for the sales week of March 28th, and it looks like we have a dominant winner in this week’s console wars. Nintendo’s Switch outsold its competitors by a massive, massive margin.
We’ve placed the statistics below, which help to show exactly how dominant the Switch was against its competitors. They sold more than 5x more than Xbox One, and almost 4x more than PlayStation 4. We can probably safely ignore how much it outsold the Nintendo 3DS, since that’s a Nintendo console as well – not to mention it was released almost a decade ago and is a mobile console.
The numbers get even more inflated when you leave North America, but there’s no region where the Switch wasn’t completely dominant. In Japan, it sold exponentially more than its competitors at a ridiculously high margin and globally clocked in with more than 4x what its closest competition, the PlayStation 4, sold.
So why did the Nintendo Switch outsell all of its competition so badly? Honestly, once you dive into it, it really isn’t all that surprising.
The first thing to think about is the release of games in March. Namely, Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped as a Nintendo Exclusive and one of the most highly-anticipated titles. There also was a Nintendo Direct towards the end of the month which raised a huge amount of hype for the system and its various titles. The other most notable title was Doom Eternal, which is available on most consoles.
Because of this, plenty of people had a reason to buy a Nintendo Switch, while anyone who wanted to play DOOM likely already had a system that the title was being released on.
There also isn’t word on if the statistics include sales of the Switch Lite. If the sales of this mobile console are being counted as Nintendo Switch sales, then the numbers might be a bit inflated.
Finally, the release dates of these consoles are important to know. The Xbox One released almost seven years ago in October of 2013, and the PlayStation 4 came out in November of the same year. The Nintendo Switch, however, just turned three after its release back in March of 2017.
That means that anyone who had an interest in an Xbox or PlayStation had almost four more years to purchase the console. Additionally, with word of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X coming out, people likely are hesitant to spend money on a soon-to-be-previous-gen console.
So while the Nintendo Switch definitely outsold its competition by a massive margin, it isn’t exactly surprising to know why. Either way, the statistics are certainly interesting at surface value.