Diablo 4 Lands at No. 2 on Switch 2 — Always-Online Caveat
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave never had to fight for the top of the Switch 2 eShop chart. Pre-loads carried it to No. 1 a week ago, and the full launch week ending September 20 kept it pinned there — exactly what you’d expect from a first-party strategy RPG with a decade of Switch-era goodwill behind it. The more useful signals sit below it: Diablo 4 lands at No. 2 just days after release, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight takes two of the top five slots on the strength of its Deluxe Edition, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds and Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter crack the top ten at No. 6 and No. 9.
An eShop chart is not just a sales scoreboard. It’s a readout of what Switch 2 owners are actually willing to download onto a handheld — and, more importantly, what they’re willing to keep installed. This week’s list skews hard toward big, connected, all-digital games, and that has real consequences for anyone playing on battery, on a train, or on a plane.
Diablo 4’s Always-Online Tether Is a Bad Fit for Portable Play
Diablo 4 is the standout, and not just because a four-platform veteran charted at No. 2 on a Nintendo console within days of launch. Blizzard’s ARPG requires a persistent internet connection, full stop. Docked in a living room, that’s invisible. On a handheld — a commute, a flight, a hotel with a captive-portal login screen — it’s a hard wall that Fire Emblem, sitting comfortably offline above it, never hits. Switch 2’s suspend-and-resume is genuinely excellent, but you can’t casually suspend a game that expects a live server handshake every time you wake it. For a device sold on portability, the week’s No. 2 game is one of the least portable things on the list.
There’s a storage tax too. Diablo 4 sits atop the download-only chart, meaning there’s no cartridge to absorb the footprint — and across every platform it ships as one of the heaviest installs in its class. Weigh that against the Switch 2’s 256GB of onboard storage and the rest of this top ten, and you start building your microSD Express budget around a single title rather than the whole library.
The Download-Only Chart Is a PC Backlog in a Nintendo Wrapper
Scroll the download-only top 30 and the pattern sharpens fast: Diablo 4, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Valheim, No Man’s Sky, Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Stardew Valley, Deltarune, Lies of P, Metal Gear Solid 4. That isn’t a Nintendo library — it’s a Steam wishlist with Nintendo’s logo stapled to the corner. The Switch 2’s real pitch to handheld players is convergence: the ability to play the PC-and-console middle ground on a device that sleeps reliably and still takes a cartridge when a publisher bothers to print one.
The catch is that almost none of these ship on a card. They’re all-digital, storage-greedy, and often online-adjacent, which pushes Switch 2 owners toward a microSD Express card far sooner than Nintendo’s own first-party lineup ever would. That’s the quiet story behind a chart that reads like business as usual: the Switch 2 is shaping up as the handheld that eats a PC backlog. Budget for the card on day one, not the week you finally run out of internal space.