The results of our Switch Summer 2024 poll are in

A few months ago, we reached out to Nintendo Life readers with our Switch Summer Surveya chunky questionnaire designed (with your help) to assess the state of all things Nintendo and Switch as the console heads into its eighth year – and as our thoughts inevitably turn to its successor.

This series of 70 questions covered everything from the Switch eShop to Joy-Con drift, your past Nintendo consoles to your hopes for the future, not to mention a selection of posers about your favorite Nintendo-focused website. Since summer ended, our data monkeys have been crunching the numbers and it’s time for the results!

All questions were optional and not everyone who took part answered every single one – responses ranged from approximately 6,000 to 10,000 unique people, so a big thank you to everyone who took the time to respond.

Let’s dive into the data, shall we? Starting with you.

You and your gaming habits

As for the location, something below 50% of you are in the US with 20% of you living in the UK that leaves around third you live outside the US/UK. There were 52% of you who have at least one child in the household, of which 25% said that you have play Swap games together in co-opnice.

When it comes to weekly gaming time, approximately 33% of respondents play up to five hours of games per weeksome more gameplay between six and ten hours, with the rest running pretty much into double figures.

Action, adventure, platformer and RPG are the preferred genres, with 61% said they mostly play single-player Switch games. Breath of the Wild (18%), Animal Crossing (15%) and Tears of the Kingdom (12%) take the podium for the Switch game with the highest number of logged hours.

17% of respondents use a PC for gaming, while 15% supplement their Switch with a PS5 versus 12% with an Xbox (Xbox Series X: 7%, Series S: 5%). Only 0.3% had never owned a previous Nintendo system (Wii and 3DS being the most popular).

Switch – games, online, hardware

Focusing on the Switch experience, of all the Switches you own, 56% are ‘Standard Switch’, compared to 16% ‘Switch Lite’ and 27% are ‘Switch OLED’.

The the most popular micro SD card was a measly 128 GB with 256 GB comes a very close other. Only 18% of you have a card with a capacity of 1TB or more. Time to upgrade when the Switch 2 comes out?

Looking at the eShop, ‘Fair’ is the most common description of the eShop browsing experience, followed by ‘Poor’, so there’s definitely room for improvement, Nintendo. 99% of respondents have a Nintendo Account, and 17% have it in multiple regions.

A quarter of respondents create their own lists or spreadsheets to track upcoming games, and 19% turn to the good old Blanket offers and 16% use of Nintendo Life Games Collection functionality.

As for Nintendo Switch Online, one in five respondents are not currently subscribed to NSO. Of those who do, 23% do not play retro games through apps at allwith only 20% playing once a week or more. People generally agree that Nintendo Switch Online is a good value.

Moving to hardware — and especially controllers — a a whopping 53% experienced drifting issues on the Joy-Conwith loose Joy-Con rails affecting 16%. Only 20% said they had no issues with the Switch’s hardware. As for pad preferences, 64% prefer the Pro Controller

More than half 51% of you said the Switch’s battery life was ‘good’ with 16% saying it was ‘Excellent’ and only 5% saying it was ‘Poor’. Additionally, 55% of you play Switch mostly ‘Docked’ and 44% in ‘Handheld’. Nintendo really got the balance right with this one, didn’t they?

Apparently, between all of you dear readers, you possess an amazing 93,196 free amiibo and 22,714 in the box amiibo. Won’t someone release them?!

Of the 600,000+ games you own, 58% were purchased digitally via the eShop and 42% were purchased as physical games. When asked about their preference over physical games, the most important factor was having a hard copy of the game that cannot be removed from the eShop.

1 in 20 respondents say they have experimented in some way with modifying their system’s firmware. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the survey is that only a insignificant 0.6% ever took their Switch to a rooftop party. Scandalous!

You and Nintendo (Life)

Getting the latest news, reviews, and previews — in that order — are the three main reasons lovely people visit igamesnews.com for all your sweet Nintendo-related content needs, with our features right behind them. 54% of you use Nintendo Life as your primary source of Nintendo informationand YouTube occupies another 25%.

In terms of the impact of our reviews, 30% of you said our reviews ‘often’ influence your purchasing decisions, and a further 47% said ‘sometimes’. Only 8% of you said that our reviews ‘never’ affect you.

When it comes to your favorite Nintendo series, The Legend of Zelda (39%) wins by a mile. Super Mario (14%) took silver, with Pokémon (9%) in third place and Metroid (6%) and Xenoblade (5%) — also a favorite series people were introduced to on the Switch — trailing behind . Of course, rectify the answer was F-Zero, which was chosen by only 0.8% of you.

Star Fox, Kid Icarus, and Wario Land are the non-Switch entries you most want to see, and as expected, a brand new Mario or Zelda will most likely make you pick up the Switch 2 on day one. Speaking of which, let’s look to the future…

Switch 2 & The Future

31% would like Game Pass to come to Switch. The same percentage of people (though not necessarily the same people, of course!) said they wouldn’t be interested in streaming apps on the Switch, though Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video were the top picks for everyone else.

When asked about your most desired Switch 2 feature, better performance in plug-in and manual mode were the most common answers, with the closely related ‘Better cross-platform game ports’ coming in third. 7% hope for the return of the famous StreetPasswhile 11% want a brand new unique feature in the mix.