It turns out if you own a Switch, you’re incredibly likely to also have some of Nintendo’s biggest games. If you don’t, your friend does. According to sales figures in the United States, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Super Mario Odyssey are all owned by half of all Switch owners.
IGN spoke with Nintendo of America president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime about the Switch’s success where he explained the exceptional attach rate of Nintendo’s first-party titles.
“Those three games continue to attach to hardware at better than 50 percent,” Fils-Aime told IGN. “Just think about that. For everyone who owns a system, more than one out of every two have bought Zelda, more than one out of every two have bought Kart, more than one out of every two have bought Odyssey. That’s never happened in U.S. video game history.”
These numbers are incredibly impressive for Nintendo and the company doesn’t have any plans on stopping, especially after the lessons learned with the Wii U.
“We’ve launched many systems, we’ve seen what works in driving a system forward,” he told IGN. “We’ve seen where we’ve lost momentum, and a critical component is having a great cadence of launches, and as you highlight, we have a number of key franchises teed up for next year.”
Fils-Aime, despite being very happy with Nintendo’s current position with Switch owners, also seems to think it’s a little early to be able to fully assess the console.
“So from my perspective, the right time to look at our performance against history is going to be as we come out of that holiday time frame,” he said. “That way we’ll be able to say after roughly 21 months, how do we stack up against all of the systems that have launched here in the U.S. and what the sell-through looks like. And that’ll be a nice moment for us to consider where we are, and also to think about how do we continue driving momentum. As you stated, we’ve already outsold the GameCube, we’ve already outsold the Wii U. How we continue to track against past systems will be something that we look at.”
