A new report from Chris Dring’s The Game Business highlights a few sales stats for launch games on the recently-released Switch 2.
According to the article, “most third-party Switch 2 games posted very low numbers” at launch, with the vast majority of players understandably gravitating towards Mario Kart World. As per data from NielsenIQ, 86% of physical Switch 2 game sales were first-party, including the MK World bundle. If we exclude the bundle, the result would be 48%.
Meanwhile, for the US, Circana states that 68% of sales were for first-party, excluding the bundle. By comparison, launch sales for the Switch 1 were 89% first-party in the UK and 81% in the US. So yes, while these numbers have dropped, it’s important to note that there are far more physical Switch 2 launch games than there were Switch 1 launch games.
The best-selling third-party game was, as most would probably expect, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition. Meanwhile, Sega is the third biggest third-party publisher for the Switch 2 with launch titles including Sonic X Shadow Generations, Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S.
However, one unnamed publisher described initial sales as “below our lowest estimates”, despite remarkably strong hardware sales.
It’s thought that there could be a few potential reasons behind this. The first is that, as mentioned earlier, most people buy Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games, first and foremost. The second is that the Switch 2 is backwards compatible, with many Switch 1 titles performing better on the new hardware, thus eliminating the immediate need to buy more new games.
The third is that most third-party games are indeed ports of older games that a lot of folks may have already played. Fourth, the vast majority of third-party titles are Game-Key Cards, which passionate fans have been against from the word go. This may have also contributed to Cyberpunk’s higher sales, which notably includes the full game on the cartridge.
And finally, Nintendo’s decision to hold back review units of the Switch 2 until the very last moment meant that consumers had no way to gauge just how viable the third-party games would be. Take Hitman World of Assassination, for example: a strong game to showcase the Switch 2 on paper, sure, but one that falls short with some pretty dismal frame rate issues.
We’ll keep an eye on how sales shake out over the coming months, but with the likes of Donkey Kong Bananza and Pokémon Legends: Z-A coming out this year from Nintendo, we suspect third-parties may continue to feel the sting for a little while longer.
