Here Are The Top Ten Best-Selling Nintendo Switch Games As Of March 2025

In before Pokemon fans complain about the games selling well spelling doom for the entirety of the series.. along with how people who bought the games are corporate shills.

That's crazy for 'worst' Pokemon game! Must really bad to do so well!

I'm quite surprised that New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe is in the top 10! Of these 10 I don't have the bottom two. I preferred the other two Mario Party entries.

Would love to know how other games have sold like Pikmin 4 or Emio The Smiling Man.

I get very sad about Scarlett and Violet.

We had some of the best NPC's in the series history like Arven, Nemona, Kieran etc stuck in an awful looking game.

Animal crossing is a beast.

I have all those Switch games above, except the Zelda and smash bros games because I have zero interest with them.

It’s always a little dull that nothing changes in this list

I think this might be the first time the second Pokemon generation introduced on a console outsold the first one, no?

(although XY and SM were very close to each other)

@John_Deacon Yea, you have a good point with Super Mario Party being the first one on Switch. And with NSMB U as well.

And the point you make about Pokémon is painfully true. The real question I am pondering about is how long they can keep getting away with it, until people are done with getting unfinished and unoptimized games. Hopefully the Switch 2 will help them release better games, but I truly wonder if they will. For me personally, I won't be buying any more Pokémon games day 1 because of how bad Scarlet and Violet were (performance wise, I mean) and how there was zero attempt to address the issues with patches.

Does the BOTW total count the Wii U version’s sales too? Curious how many units of that version were sold.

Also, the large gap (~10 Million Units) between BOTW & TOTK sales is interesting. I know TOTK hasn’t been out as long and wasn’t the big phenomenon BOTW was at the time (and TOTK also costs 10 bucks more), but it’s still intriguing if that many people passed up on its sequel if they liked the first game.

These are all fantastic games, well deserved.

@Cathalm all Pokemon are great games but the question whether it's "good" or "bad" to do so well depends on the viewpoint.

It's great for GameFreak because it shows they can keep doing the bare minimum and earn a lot of money

It's not so great for the customers since we will continue to receive severely undercooked games which have great gameplay, but work terribly

Seeing TotK so far behind BotW, thinking of the factors that were in play there.
People saying it's the same game
Not liking the open world / no dungeon format
No special items

Wow... 4-5 billion in sales on MK8D alone!

@wuntyme8 to me those numbers make perfect sense. 32 million people bought breath of the wild. 21 million of those liked it enough to buy the sequel. For the 11 million it wasn't their cup of tea. And more people are more likely to buy the first game rather than the sequel if they have gotten the console late in the lifecycle.

@wuntyme8
Just because that many bought Breath doesn't mean they liked it...

@Princess_Lilly
As someone who doesn't play or keep up with pokemon, when did the games start being bad/bare minimum?

It is a bit of a SHAM that MK is counted.

@eltomo
Breakable weapons.
Breakable Master Sword, again!

@Browntrouser
Why is it a sham?

Sad to see how well Animal Crossing sold this generation.
That game was so bad and so empty and just devoid of any fun.

So much content not included from past versions.

I'm really glad to see Super Smash Bros. Ultimate so high up.

@Spider-Kev Didn't really enjoy BOTW myself. I heard TOTK's open world is more busy and content-rich, so I might enjoy it.

Two of these games are wii u ports and they've both sold more copies than the wii u did on switch.

Scarlet/Violet...

1) Genuinely isn't as bad as people were portraying it online. A MAJORITY of glitches came from either emulations (which, hey, it happens) or from people who literally never turned off their Switch for months (people really have no idea how this is the main culprit of so many underperformance issues on the Switch. Seriously folks: LET YOUR SWITCH REST. TURN IT OFF, DON'T JUST SUSPEND IT). ... NOT saying it had no bugs, but saying that the bugs that did exist were exponentially high for some people for a reason. Personally, outside of visual bugs from me forcing the camera to move where it "shouldn't", terrible visuals from the game's forced load-ins that happen in open plains, and the extremely rare hiccup - the game held just fine, and was generally forgivable. Won't excuse it for its flaws, but just saying that exaggerations are exaggerations.

2) Is indeed incomplete, unoptimized, and lacking polish. But sadly, this has been the case with Pokemon SINCE GEN 1 - just with varying degrees with each game. NORMALLY, The Pokemon Company is able to hide these things "pretty well" - put a pretty bandaid over it and hope we don't notice (we absolutely still notice). But the bigger the game gets, the harder it becomes to mask. And with Scarlet/Violet - they didn't give their devs the chance to mask it like they normally do. Because, again - the main culprit of every pokemon game's flaw: time crunch.

3) Is the best selling game not because "Pokemon fans are shills", but because the REDEEMING QUALITIES of Scarlet/Violet really can't be passed up for anyone that plays Pokemon as a hobby. It's, by far, the most balanced game in the series competitively - with tons of its roster able to claw their way out of low tiers (you have WAY MORE pokemon to choose between, instead of just sticking with just 15 ubers). It's, by far, the easiest game to use VANILLA methods of shiny hunting, power-leveling, ev/iv-setting, move-selecting, ability-choosing, and battle item equipment buying, in the series (I can legit create a lvl 100 team with perfect ev/ivs within MINUTES and easily experiment with them to discover new strategic combinations). And the DLC ain't too shabby. It's great to get any of the fancy poke balls for my pokemon. As someone who holds a local tournament scene: I literally couldn't ignore this game no matter how "broken" it was.

4) Is BAD, but NOT for the reasons a majority of people online complain about. The one thing we DO agree on is the fact that the freedom of which order you want to battle the League - is pointless when their teams are locked to the level they're supposed to be in if you fought them in the correct order (this shows that the game WASN'T ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BE FULLY OPEN WORLD - it was just shoehorned in at the last minute... like most of the game's design). But outside of that... the game's writing is all over the place (the worst offense is the pre-Area Zero and post-Area Zero, where the main characters suddenly shift in personality due to having different writers), Koraidon/Miraidon ruin the travel experience (it really felt like rental ride pokemon were supposed to exist, and Koraidon/Miraidon were meant to be end-game travel options), the camping system in Sword/Shield would make more sense here than the picnic tables, Raids STILL ruin the pacing of the game and should be locked to end-game content, the game REALLY should've given you the option of CHOOSING ONE ROAD to complete the game with instead of having to COMPLETE ALL THREE - so that people can actually have different experiences from one another and so that speedrun categories could be genuinely fun, the game shows-off its incomplete sections like a cry for help (the worst for me is the Team Star bases CLEARLY SHOW that challenging them was SUPPOSED TO HAVE racing elements - but they tossed out the racing elements of the game and plugged their broken shards into mind-numbing minigames instead), and the characters are great and the settings are great and everything is great IF THEY WERE JUST WRITTEN BETTER. Sadly, most of the Pokemon community lives off of headcanons, so they can't see how poorly-written the game is.

5) 100% feels like it was meant for the Switch 2, but the Switch 2 got delayed and The Pokemon Company forced this game to come out regardless. Most of the game's flaws would've been masked by better console specs (faster load-ins, better graphics, better framerate, etc), and even the GameChat would've made the world feel less empty when playing multiplayer (it's also the only way anyone would know where each player is without using a 3rd party voice chat).

In short: Sc/Vi isn't what most people think it is. And that's why it still sells well.
People love it for more than what the internet hates about it.
I listed tons of flaws, but they're not the same flaws people complain about online. So, clearly, people don't really mind those flaws. So, to them, the game's worth every cent.

@Spider-Kev COVID. Words to remember.

@StewdaMegaManNerd
Scamdemic

Breath of the Wild sold more than Tears of the Kingdom in this quarter. Not by much, mind you, but it's interesting how the latter barely had any legs compared to the former.

@wuntyme8 it's only Switch sales. I think it sold something like, 2 or 3 million copies on Wii U.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will reach 70 million. What a force of nature.

I expect Mario Kart World to be the #1 Switch 2 seller for years to come as well.

I'm surprised Super Maro Bros Wonder didn't do better. That game brought a breath of fresh air to 2D platformers. It absolutely nailed everything it tried to do, and became one of the very few games I've gotten to 100% completion on. The different abilities along with the way multiplayer was added in a helpful, fun, and no-pressure manner was sheer perfection imo. I'd love to see future 2D Mario games expand upon what Wonder did.

@Spider-Kev yes, pretty much. SW/SH was already so - so with very limited "open space" and Scarlet Violet is a technological tragedy barely running at about 28 to 30 fps, empty cities and completely barebones environments. Surprisingly, the storylines were really solid and it is worth playing, but it really feels more like a student project than a game from a multi bilion company from the worlds most recognizable franchise

@Princess_Lilly
Thanks for the response!

Should I be wary of Z-A?
Besides a bit of White 2 and a few minutes of the "Hawai'i an" one, I haven't really ever played much.

I'm not one for Turn-Based combat or Grid Movement games

@Dimjimmer
One is on a nearly dead system (even two years ago) vs the other being day and date with a new system.

@GreyFenyx
What hurt that game for many was the fact that the characters all played the same.

There was no difference between who you picked.

It should have been, player-wise- more like Super Mario Brothers 2

Mario is standard
Luigi jumps higher
Toad is faster
Toadstool floats distances.

@Spider-Kev Should you be wary? I think no, I mean Pokemon games are all worth playing, it's just a shame they are very low budget.

I do recommend Sun/Moon if you want to try some Pkmn game despite the turn based combat. It's very good (my personal 3rd place after Blue and Silver) and has many quality of life features so I think it's a good starting point

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is the only odd one here, as while I don't like SV or SwSh, I understand a big reason they're here is there's no longer a barrier between Nintendo's home and handheld consoles. Although I wonder if ACNH would be on the list at all if it didn't release when it did.