It’s shaping up to be a bountiful holiday season for Nintendo.
The Nintendo Switch set video game hardware sales records in the U.S. during the five-day Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, the company said Wednesday. It topped sales of the Nintendo Wii, which was a global phenomenon at its launch, during the same five-day period.
Internal sales figures show shoppers spent $250 million on Nintendo products overall between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. That’s a 45% improvement over the same period last year.
Switch sales were up 115%, the company said, putting the life to date sales number at 8.2 million.
While the Switch is showing momentum and had a very strong kickoff to the 2018 holiday season, it still has a long way to go before it catches up with the Wii’s overall sales. The Switch has been on shelves for roughly 20 months so far. At that point in the Wii’s lifecycle, the system had sold nearly 30 million units worldwide.
Nintendo’s guidance calls for Switch sales to hit 20 million by the end of its fiscal year, a number some analysts are skeptical it will hit.
Still, the current Switch sales number is nothing to scoff at. And, more importantly, people are buying software to go with it. During the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, Nintendo sold 1 million games, a 78% jump over 2017. And next month, it will launch its biggest title of the year, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a popular fighting game.
The Nintendo Switch was among the most-purchased items online on Thanksgiving Day and the overall top-selling video game product online for the Black Friday-Cyber Monday time period, the company added, citing data from Adobe Analytics.
