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The story
According to Mat Piscatella, an analyst at the US research firm Circana, US video game hardware spending for the week ending October 31, 2026 surged 81% year-over-year — a record-breaking jump. The driving force appears to be strong sales of the Switch 2 console bundled with the 40th Anniversary Edition of the “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” remake. While the thread buzzed with excitement over Nintendo’s momentum, some pushed back, pointing to individual Walmart store stock listings and cart-add counts as evidence that standalone Switch 2 hardware sales were actually sluggish — sparking debate over which data set best reflects real-world demand.
What people said
Hardware spending spike: Total video game hardware spending for that week (ending October 31, 2026) rose a staggering 81% year-over-year.
Source: Circana / Mat Piscatella
the console itself doesn't seem to be getting any boost at all.
Switch2: 1K
PS5: 5K
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Nintendo-Switch-2-System/15949610846?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600
https://www.walmart.com/ip/PlayStation-5-Disc-Console-Slim/17816601985?classType=VARIANT&athbdg=L1103&from=/search
– Highest Metascore of 2026
– Highest user score of any game, ever
– Became the UK's best-selling game of 2026
– Set a new US sales record for Switch 2 hardware ←New
Absolutely insane!!
What about the Zelda edition specifically?
It's an 80%-ish rise overall, so even counting the Zelda edition that's probably at most 2K.
while Sony spends tens of billions pumping out garbage games, Nintendo just quietly dropped a game that deserves to be remembered for generations.
That's rude —
Sony's Wolverine will go down in history too, just as a joke.
Love that festival atmosphere.
Yeah, this year a lot of games were just 'decent,' nothing more.
In the US this is apparently Switch 2's biggest weekly sales of 2026, but in Japan the New Year's period and the pre-price-hike rush both saw bigger weekly numbers — so it really seems like the Zelda bundle's pull is way stronger in the US.
That's nuts, how many times over is that?
For Switch 2 alone, maybe around 3x?
GTA6 probably can't top Zelda's reception, so this looks like it'll be Zelda's year.
While every other game ran for cover,
Zelda alone stood and fought —
truly living up to the name 'Legend' of Zelda.
Yeah, they're holding way too much ammo in reserve.
Normally remakes lose to nostalgia for the original and get complained about, but the Ocarina of Time remake completely beat the original outright.
so this is probably only about 150-200K units sold at most.
Zelda's the only big holiday title Nintendo has, so this is actually a disappointing number if the target is 16.5 million units worldwide.
There's probably some reason they didn't bring Twilight Princess HD to Switch.
So nearly doubling sales from that already-strong period is not a small number at all.
I mean, for Switch 2 alone it's probably more than double.
Background and key points of the discussion
This 81% figure is the year-over-year change in total hardware spending (in dollars) across major consoles including Switch 2 and PS5 — it’s easy to misread this as Switch 2 unit sales alone jumping 81%, but that’s not what it means. The data comes from Circana, which absorbed the games division of the former NPD Group, and Mat Piscatella is a well-known analyst who has tracked US hardware and software sales trends for years. The thread’s central debate was over whether official sales figures or in-store stock-status and cart-add counts better reflect reality — the latter are pre-purchase signals that hint at demand but aren’t the same as actual sales. Some posts also cited prior-year monthly figures (such as Switch 2’s October 2025 monthly sales of 1.37 million units), offering a view based on absolute numbers rather than growth rate alone.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Good News] Switch 2 Sells Like Crazy in the US Thanks to the Zelda Console Effect! Up 81%, New Weekly Sales Record!“
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