We explore the cosy world-building spin-off with Game Freak’s Shigeru Ohmori and his fellow developers – and learn how it began with a Pokémon-hunting dream

Pokémon is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, and everybody knows what to expect from these games by now. The concept is simple: head into a cartoonish paradise full of whimsical creatures, capture them in red-and-white balls and assemble a team of warriors from them, before battling other aspiring Pokémon masters. But the latest entry in the series is different – a game that’s more about building than battling.

In Pokopia, a refreshingly pacific twist on the series, players are dropped into a virtual world where Pokémon are freed from their spherical prisons and happily roam their natural habitats. There’s one minor caveat – you have to create those habitats by hand, building them from what you can find.

Although it was finally replaced last year by the new Switch 2, the orginal switch isn't done just yet. Many recent Switch games (and a handful of major updates, like the one for Animal Crossing) have been released in both Switch and Switch 2 editions, and Nintendo continues to sell all editions of the original console as entry-level systems for those who can't pay $450 for a Switch 2.

The 9-year-old Switch's continued availability has helped it clear a milestone, according to the company's third-quarter financial results (PDF). As of December 31, 2025, Nintendo says the Switch "has reached the highest sales volume of any Nintendo hardware" with a total of 155.37 million units sold, surpassing the original DS's lifetime total of 154.02 million units. The console has sold 3.25 million units in Nintendo's fiscal 2026 so far, including 1.36 million units over the holidays. Those consoles have sold despite price hikes that Nintendo introduced in August of 2025, citing "market conditions."

That makes the Switch the second-bestselling game console of all time, just three years after it became the third-bestselling game console of all time. The only frontier left for the Switch to conquer is Sony's PlayStation 2, which Sony says sold "over 160 million units" over its long life. At its current sales rate (Nintendo predicts it will sell roughly 750,000 Switches in the next quarter), it would take the Switch another couple of years to cross that line, but those numbers are likely to taper off as we get deeper into the Switch 2 era.

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