If you keep an eye on the gaming news at all, you might have heard about a strange little indie game in development over the last couple of years. Often stylized as "Pokemon with guns," Palworld is an odd Psyduck, a fusion of modern crafting games like Ark and Valheim with the familiar monster fighting of the world's most lucrative media franchise. Its launch this weekend was a shocking success, selling over five million copies, shooting it to the #3 concurrent player spot on Steam. No, Palworld gets the #1 spot with a bullet among recent releases. Only PUBG and Counter-Strike 2 have reached higher numbers. And that's apparently true despite the game being exclusive to Xbox and PC (missing the large PlayStation and Switch portions of the market) and being offered to millions of players for free via a day-one release on the Xbox Game Pass.

A Nintendo Switch game console is displayed at an electronics store in Tokyo, Japan March 3, 2017. The Switch already enjoys a healthy collection of Nintendo first-party games, but last night the first Pokemon game was announced for the system. What's more, it's already available to download and play! The game is called Pokemon Quest, but it's very different from the core Pokemon games we are used to seeing on Nintendo's handhelds. This is Pokemon-lite, and it's a free-to-start game that's also heading to Android and iOS platforms.

The Nintendo Switch games console has outsold its predecessor, just 10 months after its launch. Nintendo sold 7.23 million Switch consoles in the previous quarter, bringing total sales to about 14.86 million devices. The Wii U, which went on sale in November 2012, sold 13.56 million units before it was discontinued in 2017 and was considered a commercial failure. Nintendo reported its most profitable quarter since 2009. The company announced an operating profit of 116.50 billion yen (£755m, $1.07 billion), up from 32.26 billion yen a year ago.