It’s no surprise how well the original Switch has done for Nintendo, becoming the company’s best-selling device of all-time and the second best-selling console ever. There’s a very real chance that the console market would have imploded had Nintendo not found success, though, at least according to industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto. In an interview with The Game Business yesterday, Toto expressed that “the Japanese console market would have been completely eliminated” had the Switch flopped.
“Nintendo has had an iron grip on the Japanese console market since 2017 when the Switch 1 came out,” Toto says around the 18:30 mark in the video interview. “I would phrase it a little differently. I would say that if Nintendo produced another flop like the Wii U, and if the Switch wasn’t the super hit it turned out to be, the Japanese console market would have been completely eliminated. I think that even more people would have turned to smartphones, and maybe even PC.” He states Nintendo has roughly 70% of the market share in Japan for all gaming content, which is tremendous.
While analysts aren’t always accurate, it’s hard to dispute this claim. The PS4 would be an overall hugely successful console for Sony in the global market, reaching around 117 million units overall, it still sold less than 10 million units in Japan as of 2026. Conversely, the original Switch sits at 38.5 million units in the region with the Switch 2 already hitting 6.7 million in a little over a year. The PlayStation 5 is still in an active lifecycle, but despite similar global success to the PS4, in Japan the console rests at 7.6 million units in nearly six years. Japanese gamers have preferred handhelds for a long time, and with the Switch adopting a hybrid format, it’s easy to see why it became so dominant in its home country.
One could possibly make the argument that the console market is dead and the Nintendo Switch is more of a handheld, but whatever the case, there’s a very real possibility that dedicated gaming devices would have died off in Japan had the Switch not been so successful.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
