The Switch 2's first year was better than the original Switch's in every way

Published Jun 5, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Though not often remembered now, one of Nintendo's big marketing talking points at the Switch's launch and shortly after was a promise that at least one non-indie game would launch for the system every month in the first year. The seven months between Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey were filled with spinoffs, like Fire Emblem Warriors, and ports of older games like Skyrim, Doom, and Minecraft. May 2017's big release was Disgaea 5 — a great game, don't get me wrong. But it was a safe port for NIS, who'd already found success for the series on handhelds, and hardly what you'd call a system seller. Of those in-between launches, only Minecraft made it in the list of the top 50 best-selling Switch games.

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Breath of the Wild sold 7 million copies that year, and Super Mario Odyssey sold 9 million, making them the seventh and fourth best-selling games of the year, respectively. Tentative swings, like ARMS, were sandwiched between mostly guaranteed wins, like Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (which was also criticized at launch for being barebones, like Mario Kart World).

It wasn't until after launch that Nintendo started attracting broader, successful third-party support again, and 2019 was the year things started looking up. That's when Larian ported Divinity: Original Sin 2 and CD Projekt Red ported The Witcher 3 on the platform. In theory, neither game should've functioned that well on the scrawny hybrid. In practice, aside from a little blurriness, they played wonderfully. And folks didn't mind the blur. PC accounted for most of CDPR's Witcher 3 revenue, but Switch sales of the game matched or outpaced sales on PlayStation and Xbox until the next-gen update launched at the end of 2022.best-selling Switch games

After eight years of expanding its consumer base worldwide with the original Switch, Nintendo had the grace to tinker with its other franchises for the Switch 2 in ways that would've been impossible in 2017. In 2026, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a characteristically Nintendo game — unusual, experimental, designed for a very specific audience. In 2018, it would've been lambasted as out of touch, just another example of Nintendo not making games its "real" audience wants to play.

That's the story of Switch 2's first year, though. Mario Kart World and the smash-hit Pokémon Pokopia (technically a Koei Tecmo collaboration) aside, it's been filled with risky releases like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond — a series that historically underperforms compared to Nintendo's other franchises — and unexpected surprises, like launching a Donkey Kong collect-a-thon years after that genre died off. But it's proven worthwhile.

Donkey Kong Bananza sold 4.5 million copies between July 2025 and March 2026, half the number of Mario Odyssey sales in over a slightly longer period of time. That might not sound like much. But consider the massive gulf in sales numbers that separates Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, and Splatoon games from everything else Nintendo makes. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury sold 13 million copies in three years, making it the "worst"-selling mainline Mario game on the Switch. The best-selling first-party game that isn't one of those four franchises is Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which sold 7.5 million in two years.

Donkey Kong Bananza selling what it did in less than a year (even with software price increases) is quite an impressive achievement, in other words. Even more niche games are performing better on Switch 2. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment sold 1 million copies in two months; its predecessor, Age of Calamity, sold 4 million copies in two years. Even Kirby Air Riders sold close to 2 million copies in less than a year, despite launching so close to Mario Kart World and being a sequel to an unpopular, decades-old game.

Image: Bandai Namco Studios/Sora Ltd/Nintendo

So the Switch 2's first year was marked by high sales from unexpected places and a stronger variety of launch games that the data shows resonated with more people. However, it's the system's third-party support that might prove to be even more important. The original Switch's success and the Switch 2's more powerful hardware meant publishers were eager to launch their games on the platform. They weren't all immediate successes. Cyberpunk 2077's Switch 2 sales counted for 10% of the game's revenue in 2025. However, it, along with Capcom's successful ports of Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata, is proof that the Switch 2 can handle some of the most popular third-party games on the market.

In 2017, Nintendo had to win back support from consumers and publishers. And it did. In 2025 and 2026, Nintendo proved it has a large audience of people willing to pay for smaller games and third parties launching their flagship releases on the console. As PC and console prices continue to rise in a market that's quickly outpricing most of its consumers, that's a pretty good position to be in.