Nintendo Switch 2 and its games have, unsurprisingly, started in style in Nintendo's FY2026 Q1 financial results, released just this morning. Over 6 million consoles, and some 8.67 million games for it, of which over 5.6 million are Mario Kart World.
Does this mean that Switch 1 has been wiped off the face of the Earth and the company's interests? Nothing could be further from the truth. Nintendo Switch 1 remains Nintendo's financial heart, at least for one more fiscal quarter (and most likely for the rest of the year, too). The reason is that compared to those 8.67 million Switch 2 games, 24.4 million copies of Switch 1 titles were sold. Nintendo points out that those copies are also compatible with the new console, so it's possible that some new Switch 2 owners helped lift that figure.
On the hardware side, the year-on-year Switch 1 sales drop was to be expected. More than 50% compared to the April-June 2025 period, where 2.1 million consoles were sold. This time, they are just shy of one million units (0.98 million), making a total of 153.1 million Nintendo Switch 1 consoles sold. Furthermore, this year's forecast is to reach 4.5 million Switch 1s, so if forecasts are met, Nintendo will end the fiscal year with more than 155 million Nintendo Switch 1s sold.
For the first time since the launch of Nintendo Switch 1, the trend of growth in player numbers has slowed.
It sounds alarming, but it's not at all, Nintendo's annual user growth has been expanding exponentially since 2017, going from 19 million users in FY 2017-18 to the FY 2023-24 peak of 129 million users. It appears that Nintendo then hit the potential ceiling of its reach, as in the following fiscal year the number of annual active users dropped to 128 million.
For this generation of Nintendo Switch 2, the company's biggest challenge will be to maintain the engagement of all those users as much as possible, and the report itself details that one of its core strategies will be to continue to support its "evergreen" franchises and expand them on the new hardware, so expect new instalments of the most popular franchises: Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros., Pikmin, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon and, of course, Super Mario.
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