The Original Switch Is Closing In on the PlayStation 2's All-Time Record

The best-selling console in history has kept its crown for a long time now, and the machine chasing it is still on sale. Nintendo reported its latest earnings on Thursday, November 5, and the number that matters sits near the bottom of the spreadsheet: the original Nintendo Switch has now sold 157.20 million units worldwide, as of September 30. Only one console has ever sold more.

That console is the PlayStation 2. Sony’s own history page credits the PS2 with more than 160 million sold since 2000, a record that has survived every generation since. The Switch, launched in March 2017, passed the Nintendo DS to take second place, and it is still creeping forward in its tenth year — it added another 0.61 million units in the July-to-September quarter, and 1.27 million across the half. The gap to the record is down to at least 2.8 million machines.

The chase is real, and it is slow

Do the math on Nintendo’s own forecast and the shape of the finish line comes into focus. Nintendo left its full-year outlook unchanged from May: it expects to sell 2.00 million original Switch consoles in the fiscal year ending March 2027. It has already sold 1.27 million of them in the first half. Hit that forecast exactly — this is desk arithmetic on Nintendo’s numbers, not a Nintendo projection — and the Switch ends March at roughly 157.9 million. Still short.

So the record does not fall this fiscal year on Nintendo’s own numbers. What keeps the chase alive is that the Switch refuses to stop entirely — a decade-old console, replaced in stores by its successor, still moving more than half a million units a quarter while its game library stands at 1,593.87 million sold. Every quarter it survives is another quarter the gap shrinks. The PS2 is not running anymore. The Switch still is.

The new machine cooled off. It is still ahead of the old one's pace.

The same filing carried the second generation’s story. Switch 2, which launched in June 2025, reached 26.35 million units worldwide in the same report. It added 2.67 million in the September quarter, and its first-half total of 6.49 million was down 37.4% from the 10.36 million of the launch half a year earlier. Read plainly: the launch surge is over.

Read in full, though, the cooling is not a collapse. As Video Games Chronicle’s analysis of the filing points out, launch-aligned Switch 2 is still comfortably ahead: 26.35 million at this point in its life against 19.67 million for the original Switch at the same age — a lead of more than six million units, bigger than its lead over the PlayStation 5 on the same clock, too. The honest caveat, which VGC carries and this piece keeps: the older machines were supply-constrained in their early runs, and Switch 2 was not.

The games are carrying the half

Hardware cooled; software did not. Switch 2 game sales rose 18.8% year-on-year in the half to 24.49 million units, taking the new console’s lifetime software total to 73.21 million. Mario Kart World remains its biggest seller at 16.48 million, and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream sold 8.81 million in the half alone. That mix is why the money line reads the way it does: net sales fell 12.1% to 966.0 billion yen, while operating profit rose 49.1% to 216.5 billion yen — helped by software’s bigger share and a roughly 300 million U.S. dollar refund of tariffs Nintendo recorded in the first quarter.

Nintendo kept its full-year forecast where it set it in May, including 16.5 million Switch 2 consoles for the year. The next report covers the holiday quarter — the stretch that decides whether the cooling half was a pause or a pattern, and whether the old machine’s long crawl toward 160 million picks up any speed. Two Nintendos are in this record book at once: one chasing a crown that has sat untouched for over a decade, one trying to build a bigger number than the chaser ever did. The spreadsheet gets another say in February.