Nintendo’s Profit During The Switch Generation Is Absolutely Wild

The latest financial earnings release is now live, and in case you missed it, the Nintendo Switch has officially surpassed 140 million sales worldwide.

The hybrid system has performed tremendously over the past seven years, and it’s now not far off the lifetime sales of the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PlayStation 2. However, to seriously illustrate just how impressive Nintendo’s current generation hardware is, social media user ‘Pierre485’ has shared a graph illustrating its milestones.

According to the source’s breakdown of Nintendo’s profit by fiscal year, what’s most notable is how the Switch era has actually surpassed the company’s “combined profit” from 1981 to 2016 (even if you exclude the 3DS during these years). You can see the green bars going up in the graph below, which show this major increase in profit:

The big spike for the Switch was around 2021, and before this generation, Nintendo’s success came from the opening years of the Wii and when the DS was already in full swing. The source also released the same graph factoring in inflation, reinforcing just how successful Nintendo has been during the Switch period. Keep in mind the video game industry is bigger than ever nowadays, and this includes a larger interconnected audience of players globally.

Although the Switch is still going strong, Nintendo appears to be almost ready to move on to its successor, with the company president Shuntaro Furukawa revealing the next system will be announced within “this fiscal year”. There will also be a Direct in June to focus on software for the current Nintendo Switch.