Game On

Despite wrinkles in its hardware design, Nintendo Switch is off to a fine start

Now that’s more like it. We may have fussed about the lofty price, the lowly battery life and the rake-thin launch lineup, but Switch is off to a flyer. Over its first two days on sale it became Nintendo’s fastest-selling console in history in the Americas and Europe; Breath Of The Wild became its fastest selling launch title, too. In the UK, Nintendo sold more copies of the new Zelda than it did of Wii Sports in 2006 – and that was bundled. Yes, Breath Of The Wild outsold, at launch, the fifth-most popular console of all time.

In Japan, Nintendo sold 313,000 units of its new hardware in a week, putting Switch within 10,000 of PS4’s launch sales in the territory. Of course, there are caveats. Wii was severely supply constrained at launch, as Nintendo struggled to cope with launching a new console in every major territory in the space of three weeks. Wii U had a reasonable launch weekend too, and we all know how that turned out. The release schedule for the coming months still looks somewhat bare, even if Indies have helped fill in some of the gaps.