Still as Nintendophile, the French market saw close to a million Switches sold in 2022, 987,000 more exactly, which makes it by far the best-selling console of the year on the territory. This is certainly less than in 2021 (1.3 million), 2020 (1.4 million), 2019 (1.25 million) and 2018 (1.1 million), but this new year allows the platform to accumulate 7.09 million copies in France since its debut in March 2017. In other words, the Switch is not only far ahead of the 6 million PS4s sold by Sony Interactive Entertainment France, but it is also shaking up the Wii, which for 10 years had been the best-selling home console in France with a fleet of 6.3 million consoles. That being said, the Switch can be considered both a portable console and a home console. And in the portable register, the Joy-Con console is still far from equaling the 10 million or so Nintendo DS scattered in France. Question of price and appeal to the (very) general public, in particular.
The physical market belongs to Nintendo
Without reaching the numbers of the Nintendo DS, the Switch still knows how to hit hard beyond diehard Nintendo fans. Evidenced by the success of a family game like Nintendo Switch Sports, no less than 425,000 boxed sales, so without even counting downloads. In 2022, the only Nintendo games that do better are Pokémon Purple and Pokémon Scarlet (701,000 sales), Pokémon Legends: Arceus (575,000 sales) and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (445,000), a game that more than half of owners of Switch in France have bought, notes Philippe Lavoué. Note that a complete annual report including games from other publishers will be communicated in March by the Syndicate of Leisure Software Publishers (SELL).
After almost 6 years of good and loyal service, the Switch has naturally entered its phase of decline. While waiting for the next generation, Nintendo nourishes the hope of “constantly conquer a new audience, beyond our fans“, says the general manager at Le Figaro. And this will ultimately go less through the variations of the Nintendo brands on mobile than by the opening of Super Nintendo World spaces in the Universal Studios parks, or even by a project like the animated film Super Mario Bros. which will not fail to create the event in theaters from April 5 in France.
BFM TV provides additional information on sales of Nintendo games. If we count the Violet and Scarlet editions of Pokémon separately, the best-selling game in France on the shelves in 2022 is Pokémon Legends: Arceus, of which 575,000 copies retail place it ahead of the PS4 version of FIFA 23. The ranking including download sales of all publishers should however be somewhat different, but we will not know the latter until March. Until then, Nintendo continues to reign supreme in the physical market: in the boxed top 10 of the year, only one title is not a Switch game.