Switch 2 Has Sold 26.35 Million Consoles. Nintendo Just Made More Money Selling Fewer of Them.

Your co-op partner reads earnings reports so you don't have to. Nintendo put out its latest on Thursday — everything it sold from April through September — and the headline is a split screen.

On one side: the new console is a hit by any normal measure. On the other: the last three months were noticeably quieter than the launch rush. Both are in the same report.

The score so far

Switch 2 has now sold 26.35 million consoles worldwide, as of September 30. In the most recent three months — July, August, September — it sold 2.67 million consoles and 15.04 million games. Across the full six months it sold 6.49 million consoles, and its lifetime game total stands at 73.21 million.

The original Switch, meanwhile, refuses to leave the game. It added another 0.61 million consoles in those same three months and now sits at 157.20 million lifetime, with 1,593.87 million games sold across its life. For scale: the old machine's game library has sold more copies than there are people in China and the United States combined. It's still adding to that total while its replacement does the heavy lifting.

The part that looks like a typo, and isn't

Here's the pair of numbers that will get misread all week. Over the six months, Nintendo's total sales fell 12.1% to ¥966.0 billion — and its operating profit rose 49.1% to ¥216.5 billion. Net profit rose 11.0% to ¥220.9 billion.

Selling less, keeping more. The short version of how: games are where the profit lives, and games are what sold. Switch 2 game sales across the half rose 18.8% on last year, downloads did a lot of the work — digital sales hit ¥249.6 billion, up 60.5% — and a refund of U.S. tariffs booked earlier in the year helped the profit line too. Hardware is the ticket into the park. The rides are what pay.

One honest wrinkle, because you'll see the opposite headline this week as well: looked at on its own, the July–September quarter was soft — one wire report put that quarter's profit down 16% at ¥73.9 billion, below what analysts expected. That's the same report, sliced thinner. The six-month picture is strong because the spring was strong. The most recent three months cooled. Nintendo's own hardware line shows it: 2.67 million Switch 2s in the September quarter, against the launch-era rush that put 10.36 million out in the same stretch last year for the half as a whole.

The leaderboard inside the report

Mario Kart World remains the Switch 2's best-selling game from Nintendo itself, at 16.48 million copies — meaning roughly six in ten Switch 2 owners have the kart game. Behind it among the newer arrivals: Rhythm Heaven Groove at 2.89 million and Splatoon Raiders at 2.42 million.

What Nintendo didn't change

The forecast. Nintendo left its full-year target exactly where it set it on May 8: 16.5 million Switch 2 consoles for the year ending March 2027. After a soft quarter, holding the number is a statement — it says the company expects the holidays to do the work. The next report, in February, grades that bet, and it will land after the loudest game launch of the decade has had its say on the other consoles. If you like your console wars with the receipts attached, February is your month.

Same day, other couch: Sony's version

Sony reported its own July–September quarter in the same cycle, and the comparison is the fun part — two companies, same three months, opposite shapes:

• PlayStation's games business took in ¥1.2 trillion, up 9% on last year, and its profit from that business jumped 83% to ¥220 billion. (Last year's figure had a big write-down sitting on it, which is most of why the jump looks so dramatic.)
• PS5 sold 2.6 million in the quarter — almost exactly Switch 2's 2.67 million — taking the PS5 to 97.9 million lifetime.
• 127 million people used PlayStation in the month Sony counts, up from 119 million a year earlier.
• Marvel's Wolverine, out September 15, has sold 2.4 million copies — and Sony raised its full-year games forecast by 6%, pointing at strong sales of other publishers' games. One very large car game arriving November 19 is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence.

Versus score after this round: Nintendo sold the slightly larger pile of new consoles, Sony made the slightly larger pile of money, and both of them are really just warming up for the same holiday. Player Two will be on the couch for the February rematch.