Nintendo Switch nears 5m sales in Japan

By the end of this week, Nintendo Switch is expected to have reach five million sales in its home market since it launched last year.

Nintendo Life reports that the latest sales figure for the Japanese games market, as published by Famitsu, show the console-handheld hybrid has now shifted 4.966 million units to date and with its current pace of sales, that five million milestone should only take a few days to achieve.

It brings Switch's lifetime sales closer to that of PlayStation 4, which currently stands at 6.979 million units - just two million units ahead. It's a fine achievement for the Nintendo device given that Sony's console has been on the market three years longer, although it has a long way to go if it wants to beat PS4's global sales of more than 82.2 million units.

The updated lifetime sales followed Famistu's report for August, which was the sixth month in a row that Nintendo Switch has been Japan's biggest-selling console. The device sold 199,000 over the course of the month, compared to PlayStation 4's 86,000.

Nintendo also dominated the software charts, with Splatoon 2 as the biggest-selling game of August at 96,639 units. WarioWare Gold came in second with 90,121 units, followed by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with 86,897.

Even the rest of the top five had links to Nintendo; fourth best-selling game Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum 'n' Fun! is a Switch exclusive from Bandai Namco, while Atlus' Etrian Odyssey X is only available on 3DS. The two games sold 77,761 and 75,834 respectively.

Nintendo was also the biggest selling publisher for the month, followed by Bandai Namco and Square Enix.