With the massively popular Switch, Nintendo bounced back from the underperforming Wii U and has become one of the company’s most profitable consoles, especially in Japan.
During 2019, Nintendo eliminated the market, delivering nearly 80% of its cumulative console sales all year round.
The 2019 statistics from the Japanese video game distribution company Famitsu have now been used by video game analyser Oscar Lemaire, and the Switch is 76 percent of the entire Japanese console market. This figure shows how Xbox basically has no presence in Japan and the PS4 has been stationary since 2013. That means that for most consumers the switch continues to be the hot commodity.
Its popularity has helped to quickly negate Nintendo’s Wii U blast and has stopped 3DS revenues from falling as development plans are phased out. 3DS accounted for 3 percent of the whole year of Nintendo, which still rose above the 3.5 million units sold in 2018 and 3.4 million from its starting year in 2019, up just less than 4.5 million unit (0.6 percent) as well as the PlayStation Vita (0.6 percent), and the Xbox 1 (0.1 percent). For the third year running it also dwarfed PS4 because only 1.2 million copies were shipped in one year by Sony’s flagship product, although it was its 6th year.
Thanks to this massive turnover, Switch is now 29% upon its sales figure over the year and things continue to look like the year 2020 contains popular headlines such as Animal Crossing and other franchises which will receive new instalments in the system.
Lemaire also looked into the files and compiled the figures for console sales from Nintendo over the last 20 years and noticed that the business in Japan’s era was most profitable in 2019. This two-decade window covers the Nintendo 64 tail end and the whole life of Gamecube, Wii and Wii U.
This could be a small challenge next year because Sony launches the PlayStation 5, a big Japanese seller, but the figures lead to a good year for the Switch given the new console. This is mainly because nothing like the hybrid Nintendo console is available on the market.
