In Japan, first weekend sales exceeded 330,000 units, which was on par with the PlayStation 4 during its launch period. Nintendo issued the Switch’s first month’s performance in their 2016 fiscal year results (which ended March 31, 2017), reporting that more than 2.74 million units had been sold worldwide, exceeding their target of two million. Sales during this initial period were strong in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Media Create estimated that more than 500,000 Switch units were sold in Japan within its first month, beating out the PlayStation 4 to this figure.
Samsung Gear S3
In March 2018, Nintendo announced it had also gained support of YoYo Games’ GameMaker Studio 2 engine for the Switch. Several indie developers who have previously worked on Nintendo’s consoles said that the Switch was “the least demanding Nintendo console” they have developed. Miyamoto said that Nintendo’s own developers have “mastered” engines like Unreal, so that while it would be unlikely that Nintendo would release a first-party title using such software, they can help support developers using these tools on the Switch. In addition to these third-party middleware solutions, Nintendo developed its own NintendoWare Bezel Engine for first- and third-party developers, first announced in 2018, aimed “to provide an environment that can create interesting games in a short period of time while keeping development costs as low as possible”.
While the basic Joy-Con grip that ships with the Switch does not offer charging capabilities, a separate premium Joy-Con grip includes a USB-C connector port that can be used to charge the Joy-Con batteries while they are connected to this grip. This can be expanded up to 2 TB using a microSD, a microSDHC or a microSDXC card. A microSD card slot is located under the Switch’s kickstand, where a microSD card can be inserted. If the microSD card is used, the Switch will only store game save data on the internal memory, leaving data that can be re-acquired on the microSD card. 25.9 GB of which is user-accessible.
After members of Team Xecuter were arrested and charged with eleven felony counts by the United States Department of Justice in October 2020, Nintendo filed another lawsuit against one of the arrested members, Gary Bowser; he faces two counts of trafficking and one count of copyright infringement. A temporary “boost mode” increases the CPU clock speed to 1.785 GHz. It is primarily used during loading screens. The Switch has been compared and considered to compete with consoles of both the eighth and ninth generation by sources. While the Tegra X1 SoC features 4 Cortex-A57 plus 4 Cortex-A53 CPU cores, the Nintendo Switch only uses the former, of which 1 is reserved to the operating system.
