Nintendo Switch Sales Pass NES

The Nintendo Switch has managed to pass the Nintendo Entertainment System in sales this month. Nintendo Everything secured the numbers from Nintendo’s official website that keeps count of the official sales numbers for all their consoles. Longtime fans of the brand can look back at all the previous generations and wonder if the Switch could indeed go all the way. Right now, the convertible console sits at 68.30 million units sold, which finally outstrips the NES at 61.91 million units. On its way through, the Switch has eclipsed most of Nintendo history but the 3DS, DS, Game Boy, GBA, and Wii stand at the top of the mountain right now. It would be a wild sight to see the red brand climb out of the hole that it found itself in heading into this console generation. The WiiU underperformed and experts thought Nintendo needed nothing short of a miracle. The Switch has delivered so far.

One thing that Nintendo is still working on is expanding its online offerings. A common rumor over the last year and a half has been Xbox’s GamePass making its way to a Nintendo console. Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told Gamereactor that they haven’t really talked about that possibility yet, but remain open to all possibilities.

"I think for us it's all about priority, and reaching more players," Spencer explained when asked about expansion. "So we went to PC first after Xbox, because there's just so many players there, globally, that don't own an Xbox, that we could go reach. We went to mobile next because there's a billion Android phones on the planet. It's significantly larger than any console player base. We still have iOS to go after, we will come to iOS at some point."

"We're still working on some of our technology on PC for larger screens in terms of streaming, and getting to iOS, and I think once we get through that, we look at what the other options are," he added. "There's smart TVs out there, there's Chromebooks out there, there's FireTV out there, there's a lot of discussions we would have, we would prioritize it based on where we would find the most new players, that we could naturally bring content to. I love the Switch, I love PlayStation, honestly, I think they've done an amazing job as being a part of this industry. I'm not sure that those are the next big set of users for us, but we could be open to those discussions."

At any rate, Nintendo is riding high again with the Switch. With the holidays coming up fast, it will be curious to see how much their totals can grow this calendar year sparked by Black Friday and other factors.