Switch 2 Is Nintendo's Biggest UK Console Launch Of All Time

@electrolite77 well 2 of 3, the ps4 definitely didn't launch during covid

I managed to get one click and collect from Argos on launch day , Smyths toys had some too.
A few friends are now scrambling to get one but they seem to be out of stock everywhere near me now.

for some weird reason the uk never was much into nintendo systems

Decent start. You would’ve expect Switch 2 to beat Series and PS5 the way Nintendo fanbase hyped up the machine lol

Guess internet has no effect on the real world.

It couldn't beat the Xbox Series? Things are worse than we thought.

The kingdom being a PlayStation country is Tuesday, but charting below XBS family at launch can sound like a "notoriously difficult market for Nintendo" indeed.😅

Always found it interesting how the different European countries have such differing markets.

The dawn of a new era

Good stuff.

Xbox Series sales must have fell off a cliff after launch.

@CaptainCluck

It sold double what the Switch did at launch which went on to do rather well.

@jojobar really? Anecdotally my mates were all Nintendo kids but in the 80s-90s it was Sega or Nintendo.

I don’t know about kids nowadays or since as they have more choice even just phones and stuff.

Scalpers all over the uk are rejoicing.

You can’t really read anything into launch numbers, as everything sells out. Everything. People saying oh the UK hates Nintendo, but they sold out everything they shipped, just like all those other consoles. They couldn’t have sold more. It was impossible to beat the PS5 figures if they didn’t ship as many as Sony did.

Does anyone know why the UK is a tough market for Nintendo? I didn’t realise until this week but I’ve read it a few times now. I’m in the UK and I’ve always been a Nintendo kid but barely any of my friends are or have ever been

@jojobar because playstation is marketed heavily during football matches (especially before a champions league match), and it’s the main sport in the country.

Not surprised. UK has been Nintendo’s weakest trackable region for years so it wasn’t gonna beat Sony or MS. The Japan results will be interesting though.

I think we can put to bed now the line that UK is not Nintendo friendly. The Wii U was a disaster everywhere and Nintendo hardware might not always dominate here, but they’re not exactly niche either.

Scalpers cry your eyes out....

@bandyba Sega Master System and Megadrive beat the NES and SNES in the UK where SNES was the market leader everywhere else.

Nintendo's first big success in the UK was Pokemon which is after the PS1 which just meant the Playstation had a better opportunity to entrench itself in the UK.

Basically Nintendo has never had firm foothold in the UK console market and it left a big gap for stuff like Sonic and Playstation to be disproportionately popular in the UK even compared to the success elsewhere.

Although I think Nintendo has managed to become significantly popular on the UK than it was in the 90s and early 2000s.

Not bad. I thought they were too busy with their fifas to even notice it released

@bandyba There's a lot of historical reasons. In the US, the gaming market was Atari, and when Atari stopped selling in the early 80s, they called it a crash. Nintendo swooped in to an empty market without competition and cleaned up.

In the UK back then, gaming was mostly done on micro computers, and the US 'crash' did not happen. This sent the US and the UK on very different trajectories, as Nintendo was number one in the US for 8-bit and 16-bit. They figured the UK market would be just as easy too, so didn't bother much with marketing. Consoles and games would come much, much later to the UK market and be ridiculously priced, as Nintendo was used to just being the number one brand. This worked very much against them since Sega were actually putting an effort in over here. It got even worse in the next-gen as Sony heavily, heavily marketed the PlayStation and hugely grew the entire market. By the time they released the Gamecube here, they already knew it was a flop from the US and Japan numbers. It was only from the Wii onwards have Nintendo treated the UK market seriously, and they've done pretty well since then.

Nice to see that Nintendo set a new record on a console again.

@Dr_Lugae Also in the 80s we favoured home computers like Commodore 64 and Spectrum which had a long lifespan being supported from 1982 until at least 1992 so it was hard for the NES and even the Master System to that big a degree to get a look in. I'm not even sure the Master System did very well either.

So Nintendo didn't really become that iconic brand from people's childhood here and have that to build upon.

And then the culture became more "laddish" in the 90s/00s which favoured PlayStation with it's Lara Croft, Fifa, more adult games and cooler image. Nintendo and it's games were "gay" or "kiddy" and the GameCube's "purple handbag" design probably didn't help at the time!

I think cultural shift was a big reason Nintendo started doing better here from Wii onwards. More women started gaming, more entire families, more older people etc (actually largely to do with the Wii and DS which aimed themselves at non-gamers) and the pressure on boys and men to act a certain way or play certain types of games etc isn't there to the same degree (even though it's not gone away entirely of course) I remember boys at secondary school calling N64 gay and for kids compared to PlayStation in the playground before quietly asking if they could come to my house to play Mario Kart and Smash Bros 😏

The switch in the UK was the most I ever saw in friends and family hands, even beating the old hand held only days.

Time will tell if the switch 2 does as well.

Seems to be out of stock at retailers just looked.
However anyone wanting one, Smyths Toys are saying new stock the 12th to 14th of June.

Solid start that. It will keep on selling.

With the switch 2 and because of the console price point etc.
They are really gonna to have to learn into their big in house AAA games and keep them coming at the usual top quality Nintendo do.

This is more relevant than ever with Xbox having so many studios and then along with the very new big AAA third party games will get nowhere the performance on the switch 2 if the games turn up even.

PS5 will also next year starting kicking into gear with their own big AAA release and with Xbox putting their big ip AAA on Sonys machine, it’s the machine to have PS5 or PS5 pro.

Then there is other handhelds to chose from compared to when the switch launched.

I know a lot of switch owners put off by the switch 2 price and after DKB the lack of new Nintendo in house new big AAA games coming late 2025 and into 2026.

Nintendo will have their work cut out with the switch 2 and really need to bring those in house big AAA games if they want very good success.

I have a switch 2 and pro controller and loving it, but that’s just me.

Suprisingly low debut for the Switch 2 considering that the PS5 and Xbox Series experienced shortages at launch.

Pointless statistic for PS5 and XBox as I’d say a third if not half of those sales were all purchased by scalpers and they sat on resale sites like eBay for MONTHS after launch

@CaptainCluck I’m assuming that Series is combining both numbers from S and X. I wanna see the sales number of the units separately. Cause the Series S was wildly available and was cheaper than the Switch 2. It was really only the X that had the shortage due to being the same components as the PS5, and Microsoft was splitting units between xCloud servers and consoles.

@electrolite77

Wow, thanks for such a great answer! A much better explanation than I could find after googling it.

Once again, I reiterate in a post like this that while Nintendo consoles have notoriously struggled to get a foothold in the UK (aside from the Wii), their handhelds have always been very popular here.

Case in point, the best selling system of all time in the UK was the DS. With Switch being predominantly a handheld it makes sense that it did well over here and so it’s no shock that Switch 2 is off to a great start too.

Also comparing the launch to that of PS5/Xbox Series was always going to be unfavorable to Nintendo considering those launched at the height of the pandemic and people were buying games/consoles en mass because there was nothing else to do.

Very impressive! Considering PS5/XSX launched during the pandemic when gaming was exploding in popularity, these are great results.

And I think the notion that UK is anti-Nintendo is way overblown. Sure it’s not matching Japan or USA, but these are hardly bad results, no?

Attachment to Nintendo is more generational dependant here in UK I think. I’m a millennial and Pokémon was everywhere, literally everywhere, in my childhood. So GBA and GameCube were my childhood too, then later the DS in my teenage years.

I know plenty of people who own Switches, though they’re all of a similar age to me in their 30s. I preordered a Switch 2 and I know two other people who did the same.

@Spaceman44 That's the UK. In France it almost doubled the PS5's launch and is by far the biggest ever. You could say the exact opposite in that case.
Like the article said, if you bothered to read it, Nintendo has had it much harder to break through in the UK than in other places. The Switch has not been able to surpass the PS4 there but worldwide it's ahead of the PS4 by over 35 million units. And if you paid attention, the Switch's launch was much smaller and yet it's still massively popular.
Also on the internet many people were largely negative about the Switch 2.

@electrolite77
UK still out sold Spain at 108k units by about 52k units.
Will be interesting to see France and Germany numbers as well.

@BTB20

France is one of smallest market and it’s not hard to sell more than PS5 when PS5 released during pandemic and it was extremely hard to find one because lack of stocks. I wouldn’t call that a victory.

What I find funny is a lot of the people here who say Nintendo are childish play nothing but Fifa and Call of Duty...... games played by and large by children.

UK is a PS world that fact Switch 2 can make the sales it does is a record breaking. And those trying to dismiss the sales figures regardless of region is just whinners. Those naysayers are just debbie downers because Switch 2 is a massive hit.

@Spaceman44 It's the third biggest market in Europe. Not small at all. Double the next biggest launch ever is a massive win no matter where it is. Same happened in Spain btw. Switch 2 sold 108k at launch with PSP being the previous biggest launch at 54k and PS5 at 48k and Switch 45k.
https://www.gamereactor.es/ventas-espana-nintendo-switch-2-arrasa-en-su-estreno-con-108000-consolas-1435633/
And all that despite not launching in November in peak sales season like those other consoles.

@OldGamer999 In France the Switch 2 sold apparently around 200k at launch.

@BTB20
Great numbers in France then, cheers.

@BTB20
Yes it’s not a huge victory when you could barely find Series or PS5 because pandemic.

And yes France is small market.

Whilst people give a lot of good reasons for Nintendo’s “challenges” in the UK, I always wondered if it was a cultural thing with a hefty dose of peer pressure, that there was a strong desire amongst British children to grow up quickly and abandon anything remotely childish. You sought to become “hard” and get into more “mature” and “adult” (at least on the outside) things that would elevate your “status”.

I do think this has become change as geek culture becomes more prevalent in the mainstream.

@Spaceman44 If France is a small market then every market in Europe is small. And only like three markets in the entire world are not. Namely the US, China and Japan.

@BTB20

Agree with China and US. Japan? Nope.

@Spaceman44 You think Japan is a small market for gaming? Are you serious or is this a poor attempt at trolling? You clearly have no clue what you're talking about. It's a massive market, with the Switch having shipped over 37 million units there and mobile being obsenely huge. PC is also consistently growing. Only Playstation is smaller in Japan but still relatively big compared to most other countries.
Japan generates more gaming revenue than all of Europe combined. If that is still small to you, then gaming as a whole is a small business, despite being the biggest entertainment industry in revenue for several years now.

@electrolite77 Funny, I've heard this about the NES, yet so many people in my school had one and extended family etc. I couldn't go to a house that didn't have one. Playground was all abuzz talking of Mario, Duck Hunt and many other titles.
@Suketoudara I loved our C64, or should I say my Dad'. We had a BBC Micro at school, just the one and on special occasions we were allowed to play Donkey Kong on it, it was awful of course

@Powerballad They were available on Amazon today for next day delivery.

Best selling Nintendo platform in the UK, great start.

@Varkster read his posts in Cartman's voice, makes so much more sense.

Funny how everyone b!tched about the NS2 price, yet it’s all the expensive consoles leading the show.

@WiltonRoots I blocked him after my last comment, I should have waited a little bit longer, because we now have confirmation the Switch 2 beat all sales records officially from Nintendo.

3.5mil in 4 days.

@Dr_Lugae So thats why so many sonic tubers are brits.

@Powerballad Snap, I got one via click and collect from Argos on launch day

@electrolite77 My brother ended up getting a Master System after we had the NES a couple of years. Alex the Kid built into system was a great idea.
And yes, you owe him a pint or two for sure

@Olliemar28 If the 3DS outsold the Switch in the UK at launch, why isn't it on the chart?