(Nintendo Photo)

It has been passing under everyone’s radar lately, as both Microsoft and Sony prepared to launch their next-generation consoles, but Nintendo has moved a lot of Switches this year. According to new numbers from the NPD Group, the Switch broke records in October by selling almost three-quarters of a million units.

This figure, which combines the sales of both the standard Switch and the strictly portable Switch Lite, marks a full 136% increase in Switch sales over October of 2019. This is also the second highest overall sales, at 735,000 units, for any video game console in October, after the 807,000 Wiis Nintendo sold in October of 2008.

It continues a 23-month streak in which the Switch has been the highest-selling console in the American market. While that streak is likely to be broken in November thanks to the launches of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, it’s the longest any console has topped NPD’s charts.

The Switch has sold more than 22.5 million units in the United States, according to NPD, and Nintendo says it’s sold more than 68 million Switches worldwide. At this point, it has comfortably exceeded the lifetime sales of the NES, at just under 62 million, and is preparing to break into the all-time top 10 for console sales.

Nintendo of America Charts

“Seeing encouraging sales growth like this in the fourth October of Nintendo Switch proves to us that the system has many more years and great games yet to come.” Doug Bowser, president of Nintendo of America, said in a press release.

It’s all the more remarkable because the last six months have been a relatively quiet period for Nintendo. Most other companies might have saved a few big releases for the end of this year, in order to shore up the Switch’s sales against the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, but Nintendo barely seems to be paying attention.

Its big gun for this year’s holiday season isn’t a new Mario or Zelda. If anything, it’s Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. This is a limited-time release to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Fire Emblem franchise, and marks the first time that Shadow Dragon, the first game in the series, has ever been officially translated for release outside of Japan. It’s a big deal for enthusiasts, who’ve already reserved most of the physical copies of its collector’s edition, and for exactly nobody else.

(Nintendo Photo)

Nintendo is coming to the end of a particularly good year, though. While 2019 featured a consistent lineup of hits for the Switch, with exclusive releases like Pokémon Sword and Shield, Super Mario Maker 2, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Astral Chain, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Nintendo ran the tables on 2020 with the release of its “life simulator,” Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

While a new Animal Crossing game was always going to be a big hit — the series is known for sucking players in for hundreds of hours, and New Horizons was one of the most hotly-anticipated Switch titles — it happened to release at just the right time to serve as a much-needed distraction for a world that had just started socially distancing.

The result was a genuine blockbuster. As per Nintendo’s public sales charts, New Horizons has sold just over 26 million copies this year as of September. That makes it the second best-selling game in the Switch library, behind Mario Kart 8; easily one of the best-selling video games of all time; and the second best-selling game in 2020 so far, after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. New Horizons hasn’t left the NPD’s monthly best-seller charts since.

(It’s also worth noting here that 26 million units sold would make New Horizons number one with a bullet in any other modern console’s library, but it’s #2 on the Switch. In fact, the top four best-selling games on the Switch are all at or near 20 million. Only one game ever matched that sales rate on the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One: the PlayStation 4 port of Grand Theft Auto V. Nintendo’s first-party games on Switch all have insane attach rates compared to every other system’s exclusives.)

That’s enough to explain the Switch’s 23-month hot streak. Nintendo released Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in December of 2018, which was an instant success, and followed up on it with a litany of hits in 2019 and early 2020. Now, even though the release calendar has slowed down once again, the Switch is still selling like crazy with no end in sight.

It’s really a testament to the work Nintendo has been doing. It has spent much of the last few years building out its library of exclusive first-party titles, to the point where Metroid is now its only tentpole franchise that hasn’t yet had a new release on Switch.

As a result, the Switch has what might be the strongest games library of any Nintendo platform since the SNES, and almost all of its top sellers are published or co-published by Nintendo itself. While both Sony and Microsoft are going into the ninth console generation with a genuinely overwhelming technical advantage, Nintendo is currently riding what might be an all-time high.

NPD Group, based in Port Washington, New York, is a market research company that measures consumers’ shopping behaviors in multiple industries, including books, toys, office supplies, and kitchen appliances. It began tracking the video games industry in 1995, and since many video game companies are notoriously reluctant about sharing their internal data with the public, quickly became one of the best (and only) available resources for sales information.

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