Nintendo Has Sold Over 860 Million Consoles and Over 5.9 Billion Games - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 August 2025 / 11,023 Views
Nintendo announced it has sold over 860 million consoles and over 5.9 billion games.
"Since the 1983 release of the Family Computer (Famicom) system in Japan, and continuing through Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo’s focus has been the development, manufacturing, and sale of its gaming systems and software," said Nintendo.
"To date, Nintendo has sold more than 5.9 billion video games and over 860 million hardware units globally, and has created franchises such as Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Metroid, Kirby, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, and Splatoon."
The Nintendo DS is currently the best-selling Nintendo platform with 154.02 million units, however, the Nintendo Switch is on track to surpass it in the coming months.
Here are the best-selling Nintendo platforms (units shipped):
- Nintendo DS - 154.02 million
- Nintendo Switch - 153.10 million (and counting)
- Game Boy - 118.69 million
- Nintendo Wii - 101.63 million
- Game Boy Advance - 81.51 million
- Nintendo 3DS - 75.94 million
- Nintendo Entertainment System - 61.91 million
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System - 49.10 million
- Nintendo 64 - 32.93 million
- GameCube - 21.74 million
- Nintendo Wii U - 13.56 million
- Nintendo Switch 2 - 5.82 million (and counting)
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Just imagine if the GBA had a full life cycle, wonder what those numbers would have looked like.
If it had a normal life cycle, it's successor probably would have released around 2007. With that in mind, I could easily see the GBA reaching over 100m in that case, but still likely falling a bit short of the GB. I'd imagine they'd squeeze another generation of Pokemon out of the GBA in this scenario, to help.
considering how much GBA rom hacking shows its potential, GBA could definetly get another gen
I really appreciate these updates from Nintendo, with these accurate direct-from-the-source numbers on their console sales history. I really wished other companies were this transparent and did the same - looking at your Sony and Microsoft.
Huh.
Are we in the dark about Playstation hardware sales? Which one specifically?
PS2 lol
What's the matter with PS2's official hardware data?
The official hardware data one year ago was "155 million", now it's "160 million".
Afaik, the 155 figure was reported in March 2012 - and never updated since up until last year.
PS2 production stopped one year later, in 2013.
So why should 160 (160.63m) be flawed?
Neither 155 or 160 million are "real" numbers though, not unless Sony just happened to stop tracking/selling at a exact round number. Every time they mentioned them, it was in a round-a-bout way as well - like "over 155 mil" or "close to 160 mil"
Now, if Sony had said it sold 155.39 million in March 2012, then later said it was at 159.85 million this year, which could be rounded up to 160 - I might except that. Like real, exact numbers.
I say all this as a PS guy. I only really game on PS5, and I still own all my PlayStation systems - PS1, PSone, PS2, PS2 Slim, PS3, PS3 Slim, PS4, PS4 Pro, and PS5. No PS5 Pro though yet, cause $699 is a complete joke lol
Edit: nevermind. Confused it.
"Afaik, the 155 figure was reported in March 2012 - and never updated since up until last year."
And that's problem number 1.
Problem number 2 was explained by NextGen.
I don't understand. Why?
PS2 was still in production throughout 2012, and is said to have sold more than 4 million units in its last year until production closed in 2013.
I think this is more about a bit bias towards Nintendo than a reasonable doubt that PS2 didn't sell-in 160 million units (160.63, according to Wikipedia.)
The problem is that we didn't get an official update until late last year. For most of 2024, the official number was 155. Doesn't sound very transparent of Sony, does it? Any now of course, we still only have round ups instead of precise numbers.
So why is that a problem? Explain THIS portion of your argument to me.
If I'd follow YOUR argument, then Sony sold 155m PS2s up until March 2012, and right after that zero, the next day already.
(Although they stopped producing PS2 officially in January 2013!)
No offense, but I think this line of argument is rather a problem than Sony deciding to announce figures in 2024. It could have been 2023, or 2025, but they went with 2024. So what's the deal about it?
Dude, I think you are a little lost, we were talking about TRANSPARENCY, it took Sony 12 years to update us that they sold another 5 millions PS2, that wasn't very TRANSPARENT of them.
Ah, so you're criticizing that they took so long.
Ok, that's fair.
the switch 2 will bring this number close to a billion consoles sold
I like how they've just completely erased the Virtual Boy from their history haha
+914M with Color TV-Game and Game&Watch.
I don't remember if it was E3 2004 or 2005. Reggie did a speech about peoples heads filled with numbers. 360 and specs of other consoles. Then as Reggie does, does a cute version. He threw up the number 2. As in 2 billion games sold for Nintendo and said it was a great beginning. 20 years to reach 2 billion games sold and 20 years later they tripled that.
Would be something if they could reach a billion sold consoles by selling 145 million Switch 2's. Going to be difficult, but you never know.
I think it's doable. They need to do a combined one with Switch 1 so in all fairness the S2 needs to sell under 140 million. It should be doable in a generation.
Without the Switch 2, Nintendo is at 864.13 million. That would put the Switch 2 at 135.87 million to reach 1 billion without factoring in what the Switch 1 will add to the total. Around 130 million is likely what the Switch 2 needs to sell for Nintendo to top 1 billion.
I’m expecting it to happen next gen but would love to be proven wrong.
Thats honestly a big flex for Nintendo.
A great start:)
It's possible but not the most probable that Switch 2 will bring this to 1 billion hardware units.
First to a billion?
