Christmas might not be as important a celebration in Japan as it is elsewhere in the world, but regardless, Nintendo had a good one.
In December, the company achieved sales figures that haven’t been seen for the better part of a decade, since the Wii’s family-friendly motion controls took the world by storm.
As Nintendo Life reports, new figures released by The NPD Group – a firm that tracks industry data – reveal that the Switch beat out the PS4 and XB1 to take the crown as the highest-selling console in the lucrative Christmas period.
In fact, it had the single best Christmas any of these consoles has seen yet – in the US, at least.
“Nintendo Switch generated the highest December month hardware dollar sales for a single platform since the Nintendo Wii in December 2009,” explains analyst Mat Piscatella, “and achieved the highest December unit sales for a single platform since December 2010.
It’s not just a great December, though: the Switch also sold the most units across the whole year in the US, and brought in the highest revenue.
“Nintendo Switch ends 2018 as the year’s best-selling hardware platform in both units and dollars,” Piscatella continues. “Annual unit and dollar sales of Nintendo Switch are the highest annual total for any hardware platform since the PlayStation 4 in 2015.”
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe will hope to be the next big seller for the Switch in 2019
A great result for the Switch, but hardware sales are just one piece of the profitability puzzle – the real margin comes on selling plenty of software, and it’s here that the Switch has often been criticised over an apparent lack of compelling titles.
While 2017 saw a strong one-two punch of brand new Mario and Zelda titles, 2018 was comparatively weak until the arrival of tentpole release Super Smash Bros. Ultimate just in time for Christmas.
The strategy worked. As Forbes reports, Smash sold so well that it even managed to beat the Rockstar-produced cinematic blockbuster Red Dead Redemption 2 and a resurgent Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 to be crowned the United States’ best-selling game of December, despite being released a quarter of the way into the month.
It was a great software month all-round for Nintendo, with Smash topping the list, while Mario Kart 8, Super Mario Party and Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! all landed in the top 10 as well. Pokemon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild landed at #12, #13 and #14 respectively, giving Nintendo’s first-party titles 7 of the top 15 spots on the December sales charts.
Going even further, the #5 ranked NBA 2K19, #16 ranked FIFA 19 and #18 ranked Minecraft are all available on the system as well, adding up to a solid 50% of the top 20 games of December being options for Switch owners.
As a final cherry on top, Mario Kart 8‘s performance across both the Wii U and Switch has scored it the honour of being the second-highest-selling racing game of all time, beating out the legends like Sony’s Gran Turismo and Microsoft’s Forza series. Number one? Its predecessor, Mario Kart Wii.
All in all, a fantastic end to the year for Nintendo, and an ideal launching pad into a 2019 that might see a revised Switch come into existence with a handful of improvements, to tempt those who haven’t yet taken the plunge.
Read: The big improvements Nintendo could make to the next Switch
