If you thought Nintendo was having a bit of a slow year on the Switch, well, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate likely made up for that over the weekend, recently being named Amazon's highest-selling video game of 2018.
There are a few caveats to take into consideration but, no matter how you slice it, that's some pretty impressive news. It's also worth noting, as highlighted by the initial report from Comic Book, that Super Smash Bros. has achieved this feat after only a day on the market. Sure, it's been available for pre-order on Amazon for months but, still, a hell of a lot of people were clearly eager to get in on the brawl.
Now, for those of you pointing a finger at Red Dead Redemption II and Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII with questioning stares, there are some extra factors to keep in mind. The main one you've got to remember is that Amazon treats each platform as a separate entity. In other words, sales for Red Dead on the PS4 and Xbox One are tallied separately rather than combined, otherwise there's little chance Smash Bros. would be receiving this distinction.
But it's also important to note that, yeah, Smash is only available on one platform and it's apparently pulling down some insane numbers. So even if it doesn't best the combined sales of those other major hits, the fact that it's doing so well on just the Switch shows just how many people decided to pick up the game.
Of course, none of these Amazon stats take into account digital sales, which will likely complicate the total sales figures further. A lot of people have switched to digital these days and probably downloaded Smash instead of buying it from Amazon. There are also other physical retailers to consider so, again, it's likely Smash's overall sales are very, very impressive.
As the initial report points out, this accolade actually applies across all of gaming on Amazon, including everything from consoles and peripherals to the usually impressive sale of things like digital currency.
That's certainly not a bad way to cap off a year that many considered "slow" for Nintendo. That assessment seems a bit farfetched in my book, as it's almost unfair to compare any standard year in games to the first year on the Switch. Nintendo kept an insane flow of games coming during the console's initial year, so there was no way 2018 was going to live up to that murderer's row of hits. But still, this year saw the likes of Pokemon Let's Go, Mario Tennis Aces, Super Mario Party, Octopath Traveler, Diablo III, a whole bunch of third party hits and oodles of indies.
In other words, I think it's fair to say the Nintendo Switch had a very solid sophomore year that was capped off in a big way by the latest Smash Bros.
