Nintendo’s financial report results for Quarters Three and Four 2024 are weighed in. It appears the Switch is in the endgame to become the Big N’s bestselling console of all time. While Switch sales have expectedly declined since its successor was made known, numbers for the sunsetting console are clocking in at impressive rates. We now know that over 150 million Switch units were sold in the console’s lifetime. To put that in perspective, Nintendo’s bestselling console is the DS which sold 154.02 million units. Experts think that the Switch will easily beat the DS and may even beat the Playstation 2, which currently sits as the bestselling console of all time with 160 million units sold. Nintendo’s financial report can be found here.
As for game sales, let’s check in to see how Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom are doing. The report revealed Echoes of Wisdom earnings have clocked in at 3.9 million units worldwide. It’s not nearly as much as Tears of the Kingdom, which sits pretty at over 20 million copies. But considering that the Link’s Awakening remake for the Switch has sold over 6 million units, 3.9 million for its cousin title still isn’t a bad number.
Tears of the Kingdom versus Breath of the Wild sales were not mentioned in Nintendo’s Q3 / Q4 report, but it isn’t hard to figure out their sales track with existing data. From what we do know, sales for both games are steady Breath of the Wild has sold over 31.8 million Switch copies since its lifetime as of December 2024. (It sold 1.7 million Wii U copies.) That’s a third more than Tears of the Kingdom’s sales, but it’s important to remember that Breath of the Wild has been in the market for close to eight years while Tears of the Kingdom has been available for less than two. What’s impressive is that the open world Zelda pair boasts over 40% of the Switch’s total game sales combined. Even more brow-raising is that either game’s sales numbers is at least double the sales of any other Zelda game that came before them. That’s staggering to even fathom!
Such numbers are hard to ignore regardless of preferences for open world Zelda’s. Whether the next Zelda game will be open world or linear, it’s bound to be influenced by Hyrule’s Wild era in some way or another. Heck, the Switch 2 may be influenced by the Wild era. It’s still a waiting game to see whether that becomes true or not.
