Nintendo Switch sales soar during lockdown, setting huge sales record

You may be familiar with the Coronavirus pandemic that has led to a lockdown for many. As a result of being stuck indoors, myriad people have turned to gaming as a solution to finding entertainment for countless hours. As a result of this increased traffic on networks, sellouts, social chatter, and so on, some new numbers are available regarding sales. Foremost among these, the Nintendo Switch broke the Wii’s record as the highest year-to-date dollar sales for any hardware platform.

Sales up for Nintendo

Sales are up across all measured segments, including accessories to game cards to in-game purchases to software.

The top-selling game for the month was Final Fantasy VII Remake, which ended up setting a series record. The next title was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Software sales increased 55% compared to April 2019 to a total of $662 million, a new record for the month. Overall video game expenditures went up by 73% compared to last year, reaching $1.5 billion.

NPD also released a nice video overview of the results, which can be viewed via YouTube.

A reason behind the growth

If you’re looking for a reason for why the increase in sales, one need look no further than the lockdown. People are stuck at home, bored, and looking for something to pass the time beyond Netflix. May is likely to put up some huge numbers still, but the jump may not be as high as April. The rate of this astounding growth is by no means sustainable, so things are expected to return to a regular baseline rate.

However, sales may still be higher than in previous years. Consider that a person previously wasn’t into playing video games, but spent some time playing them over this lockdown period. Odds are that they may continue buying video games going forward, which could result in a higher baseline for sales. It ultimately depends on how many people have adopted gaming as a new hobby.

What the future holds

Then there’s the question of what “after the lockdown” means for consumers. Many states are beginning to reopen their economies for business. But still, a large majority of Americans are cautious about catching the Coronavirus. So it may be unlikely that many are ready to return to life as normal quite yet.

So we could still expect to see some significant growth numbers for gaming over the duration of May and June.

Ryan Goodrich

Ryan has been writing since long before he could even write. He's written resumes, software user guides, consumer electronic reviews, and myriad web content spanning a variety of industries. But now he's writing about video games, which is much more interesting.

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