Wordle heads to television and Nintendo Switch 2’s big sales surge | Week in Views

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The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can’t let go of…

So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we’ve created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.

NBC greenlights Wordle game show adaptation for 2027 debut

A slightly unexpected transmedia story this week. NBC has greenlit a television adaptation of Wordle, the virtual daily word puzzle game now owned by The New York Times. 

The show is set to be produced by Universal Television Alternative Studio and executive produced by Jimmy Fallon, with Savannah Guthrie hosting. 

The show is going into production this year, with a release expected sometime in 2027.  Teams will solve word-based puzzles before they face off against each other for a cash prize. 

We’re certainly not short on video game adaptations right now, but we’re used to seeing major game franchises become films and series. Wordle is a simple puzzle game and something different in terms of the types of transmedia projects we’ve been seeing.

The fact that they believe the brand alone is strong enough to anchor a quiz show demonstrates how embedded some games are in our daily lives. Because the reality is, NBC could make any generic word quiz show under absolutely any name.

Choosing Wordle specifically suggests there’s strong weight to that IP and they believe it comes with a pre-established audience. With millions of daily players still active on Wordle, who can blame them for thinking so? 

It’s just another reminder that gaming’s influence on wider media is stronger than ever.

Nintendo Switch 2 nears 20m unit sales in under a year but shares have tanked 40%

The Switch 2 sold 19.86 million units in its first 300 days, already outperforming the original Switch’s first year by 32%.

It’s a crazy number – easily surpassing Nintendo’s initial 15m prediction and even the company’s revised 19m projection that came down the line.

The figure was confirmed as per Nintendo’s latest financials, highlighting the record-breaking console’s unit sales as well as its game sales. Its best-selling game thus far is Mario Kart World, which makes sense as a launch title and a package deal for those willing to spend some extra cash in the Switch 2’s early months.

Mario Kart World has a 74% attach rate on Switch 2, continuing a trend from recent gens. Mario Kart 7 was the best-selling 3DS game, Mario Kart 8 was the best-selling Wii U game and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the Switch’s biggest seller.

No doubt which IP is the fan favourite among Nintendo fans.

On the subject of software, Nintendo also confirmed the original Switch has surpassed 1.5 billion game sales in its lifetime. I took a look back at Nintendo’s earlier consoles for comparison, and to put this in context, more games have now been bought on the Switch than on the SNES, N64 and Wii combined.

I’ve not seen this mentioned anywhere else (am I the first to count them up?) and think it’s quite the fun fact.

I also found it noteworthy that Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, Wii games ported to Switch last October, shipped more than 5m copies combined by the end of the fiscal year. Clearly, these games were re-released to drum up hype for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, released on day one of the new financial year, so I’d be curious to know how many cinema tickets have been influenced by these 5m game sales.

At the same time, I’ll be curious to see in future financials how many more game sales have been achieved since the movie’s release.

Finally, I was surprised to see no mention of mobile whatsoever in Nintendo’s latest report. The platform gets rolled into its ‘IP-related business’ category which also includes transmedia, but I at least expected some reference to Fire Emblem Shadows’ release in the fiscal year – Nintendo’s first mobile game of the decade.

It may be making just 1% of what Fire Emblem Heroes did back in the day, but surely it was still worth naming.