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Sales Data Updated sales numbers for Switch titles: Pikmin 4 (2.61M), Tears of the Kingdom (19.50M), and more

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Octavian said:
Yeah that's enough time for people to actually beat the game, digest it and form more thought out opinions
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We’re getting off-track. The point is you can’t conclude that sales (actually shipments) are slowing down because TotK is getting negative reception. Not with one quarter’s worth of data, and not when there are other explanations for the shipment numbers.
 
Octavian said:
Zelda cycle is a meme. Discourse generally stayed positive about OOT, TP, and BOTW all throughout the times they were relevant. MM and WW had negative reception before people warmed up to them.

It's only certain entries like SS and TOTK that got overrated at launch and needed critical re-evaluations. (SS has a 92+ MC despite wildly being seen as the weakest 3D Zelda, negative reception that caused even the devs to reevaluate the series!)
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The "Discourse" about TOTK is just as positive as it was about BOTW; there's always going to be nagging voices when you sell 20m complaining about weapon degradation for example from BOTW, but the saner people are all only talking about how TOTK is literally one of the two games actually in the running for best game of the year in one of the most stacked years in memory.

Octavian said:
Yeah that's enough time for people to actually beat the game, digest it and form more thought out opinions
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Ah, I see we're doing the BOTW honeymoon period thing all over again then.
 
I was hoping that Pikmin 4 would have hit 3 million during its first quarter. But, similar to how I felt about Metroid Dread's sales, it still quickly became the best-selling game in the series in a short timeframe regardless, so I can't really complain. Plus, it's getting that bundle with Wonder in Japan soon, so it could reach or even pass 3 million once the fiscal year is done.
 
I think that BotW was such a killer app for the Switch that there were always going to be people who picked it up due to it "being the done thing" only to find out they bounced off it. With TotK being very obviously more of the same, some of those sales would be lost.

In fact, how few sales appear to have been lost is actual an enormous endorsement of how much people loved BotW - TotK's sales are simply astonishing, and it should have a terrific holiday season.

But unless it gets a dedicated Switch 2 port I don't expect it to catch BotW.
HockeyBird said:
This whole discussion about whether the very successful sequel will get in front its the very successful prequel

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More BOTW owners means more people who will pick up the its direct sequel and TOTK being a major seller means more people will want to pick up BOTW to see what all the hype around the series is about. They each boost the other up. TOTK hasn't even been through its first holiday season yet. It's gonna be featured in Nintendo's holiday ads and it will get some "free" marketing come award season.

An interesting thing about first party software in general is that more titles are becoming evergreen. Nintendo titles maintain their relevance meaning the games don't become obsolete once another title in the series releases. Sales of other Mario games aren't going to collapse because Wonder is out. A kid getting a Switch and Wonder over the holiday will go back to play titles like Mario Odyssey, 3D World, and yes, New Super Mario Bros. U. Think of all the choices a relatively new Switch owner has. They got 5 or 6 Mario platformers. 4 Zelda titles. 3 Kirby games. 5 Pokemon RPGs. People still play Smash Bros. Ultimate and there's a ton of content for a new buyer to experience. 5000 tracks in Mario Kart 8. Then there's the rest of Nintendo catalogue. Even just being a Nintendo fan in general means years of content to get through so games will keep selling well beyond their initial launch.
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I'm not sure about this. BotW and TotK are the only Zelda games where if someone hadn't played either yet, I'd tell them to only buy one.

You're looking at at least 50-60 hours (and possibly 100s of hours) running around Hyrule in either, and then... jumping right back into that same Hyrule for another 50-60 hours. With the same story structure, the same combat, the same story beats etc. It's a big ask.

I think most people new to the series will be told just to pick TotK as the bigger, newer game. I don't think it's at all comparable to the Mario games where each offers something really distinct.

It's a shame, because if BotW and TotK didn't share an almost identical map, I wouldn't see this as a huge issue.
 
meatbag said:
We’re getting off-track. The point is you can’t conclude that sales (actually shipments) are slowing down because TotK is getting negative reception. Not with one quarter’s worth of data, and not when there are other explanations for the shipment numbers.
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that's fair, but I think the reception/less-than-stellar WOM will continue to have an impact on its sales
 
....TOTK does not have bad WOM at all



this didn't slow down Odyssey at all for instance. I think this is another example of a bubble forming
 
Kinda amusing how some people here and on other forums try to paint TOTK sales numbers as disappointing eventhough it sold ~20 million units in 5 months without a single holiday season. Amazing, really.
 
Lugia667 said:
....TOTK does not have bad WOM at all



this didn't slow down Odyssey at all for instance. I think this is another example of a bubble forming
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well Joseph Anderson is a midwit with bad opinions.

Essayists aside I do think there's less buzz and more critical discussion online around TOTK than BOTW at this point in both their lifecycles.
 
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Octavian said:
that's fair, but I think the reception/less-than-stellar WOM will continue to have an impact on its sales
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I would say that as far as concrete metrics go, TotK sales suggest that WOM is indeed stellar. We’ll see how the holiday quarter plays out, but at 19.5M, TotK is already a veritable megahit.

DecoReturns said:
I’m in the wrong circles cause I’ve just seen very positive word of mouth lol
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WoM is definitely hard to qualify because our anecdotal experiences will differ wildly. I personally saw more negativity surrounding BotW compared to TotK.

SpaceGodzilla said:
remind me to never consider your opinions ever again
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This kind of rudeness is unwarranted.
 
pld said:
Kinda amusing how some people here and on other forums try to paint TOTK sales numbers as disappointing eventhough it sold ~20 million units in 5 months without a single holiday season. Amazing, really.
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I don't think anyone here is painting TOTK sales as disappointing, 20m is still an insane amount. I can't even deny it's a megahit.

my point is it's interesting to see how front loaded that was off of goodwill from BOTW and pre-release hype. I think if the next mainline Zelda is BOTW 3 (I.e. same formula) you're gonna see a large dropoff in sales, as people get tired of the formula and evaluate the flaws in TOTK. In the same way there was a dropoff from TP to SS.
 
Octavian said:
I don't think anyone here is painting TOTK sales as disappointing, 20m is still an insane amount.
my point is it's interesting to see how front loaded that was off of goodwill from BOTW and pre-release hype. I think if the next mainline Zelda is BOTW 3 (I.e. same formula) you're gonna see a large dropoff in sales, as people get tired of the formula and evaluate the flaws in TOTK
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Positive reception of the prior game tends to lead to strong sales for a direct follow-up. That's not news.
 
Octavian said:
a few examples:




at the very least, the general discourse around the game has been FAR more negative since people have played and digested the game. Compare this to the unabashed positive hype pre-release and the post-release honeymoon period before people beat the game.

I would argue I'm seeing far more negativity around TOTK than BOTW at similar points in their release trajectory. BOTW had more of an impact too due to its originality.
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Screenshot_15.png

this is the person your repping with that last video
 
Hailinel said:
Are people in here really shitting on the sales of a game that sold close to 20 million in two quarters on the market and has yet to see a holiday sales season?
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If you call pointing out that "probably not off to a good enough start to match arguably the biggest series reinvention Nintendo has ever had, which reached the top 20 selling videogames of all time, at least according to the wikipedia list", sure, people are 'shitting on' something. I personally draw the line for what constitutes shitting on a thing at a bit lower than pointing out something probably isn't going to quite be top 20 seller of all time, but opinions and all that.

Well, except for whatever is going on with Octavian suggesting TOTK has bad word of mouth in any sense, I don't know what's happening there.
 
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Josh5890 said:
We live in a world where a Mario Party game is about to cross 20m.
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Higher sales than TotK at a fraction of development costs too…maybe Nintendo should ditch Zelda and focus on their money makers 🤡
 
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Octavian said:
Oh ew, honestly I didn't watch the video/know the channel, it just came up as one of the first YouTube results for TOTK. I'll remove it
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The whole video could’ve been cause they thought the game was woke rather then any actual discussion regarding your point lol

Thought if I’m being honest. That thumbnail should’ve told you it was not a video you should’ve used as a reference without reviewing it
 
Hailinel said:
Positive reception of the prior game tends to lead to strong sales for a direct follow-up. That's not news.
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yes and? I acknowledged that and it's not my point. Point is, I don't see a BOTW 3 having the same positive sales momentum from TOTK as people get tired of the formula and continue to critically re-evaluate TOTK past its launch honeymoon. The WOM/discourse is worse than BOTW from where I'm standing
 
DecoReturns said:
The whole video could’ve been cause they thought the game was woke rather then any actual discussion regarding your point lol

Thought if I’m being honest. That thumbnail should’ve told you it was not a video you should’ve used as a reference without reviewing it
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Hailinel said:
This should go without saying, but know a video's source and content before citing it for any reason.
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yeah my bad for being lazy, it was just one of the most viewed TOTK videos so didn't think it could be that bad
 
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People in here doing discourse and post-mortems on TotK having an "underwhelming" showing, and I'm just sitting here all smooth-brained thinking "dang, almost 20 million in less than a year is just completely absurd"
 
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The discussion in here is pretty banal I have to say. But something else to notice: once TOTK and Super Mario Party breach the 20 million mark over the holiday, plus assuming that Super Mario Bros Wonder gets there sometime next year, with it being the last super super seller on Switch, that'll mean that the Switch will have TEN titles selling over 20M units, which seems like an unprecedented and underappreciated point.
 
wonaph said:
The discussion in here is pretty banal I have to say. But something else to notice: once TOTK and Super Mario Party breach the 20 million mark over the holiday, plus assuming that Super Mario Bros Wonder gets there sometime next year, with it being the last super super seller on Switch, that'll mean that the Switch will have TEN titles selling over 20M units, which seems like an unprecedented and underappreciated point.
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Could’ve been 11 titles if they just made Pokémon Colosseum remake.

Absolute failure there
 
Nintendo:
Makes over 1.4 Billion dollars of revenue over a single game in the span of 6 months

Famiboards: Now let me explain to you why this is a failure. And why that game was "received negatively"
 
While I've certainly seen more critique of TOTK in the weeks after launch than I recall of BOTW, none of the criticisms really enter "this is a bad Zelda game, actually" territory, so I have no idea where the notion that this game has poor word-of-mouth is coming from. People saying that it's just on par with BOTW (oh no?) isn't going to make people run for the hills.
 
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Heron said:
I think that BotW was such a killer app for the Switch that there were always going to be people who picked it up due to it "being the done thing" only to find out they bounced off it. With TotK being very obviously more of the same, some of those sales would be lost.

In fact, how few sales appear to have been lost is actual an enormous endorsement of how much people loved BotW - TotK's sales are simply astonishing, and it should have a terrific holiday season.

But unless it gets a dedicated Switch 2 port I don't expect it to catch BotW.

I'm not sure about this. BotW and TotK are the only Zelda games where if someone hadn't played either yet, I'd tell them to only buy one.

You're looking at at least 50-60 hours (and possibly 100s of hours) running around Hyrule in either, and then... jumping right back into that same Hyrule for another 50-60 hours. With the same story structure, the same combat, the same story beats etc. It's a big ask.

I think most people new to the series will be told just to pick TotK as the bigger, newer game. I don't think it's at all comparable to the Mario games where each offers something really distinct.

It's a shame, because if BotW and TotK didn't share an almost identical map, I wouldn't see this as a huge issue.
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Well it's a good thing that people aren't listening to your bad advice. We can see that BOTW is still selling well despite TOTK's release and you could see there was a pick up in sales in and during TOTK's release. People are picking in BOTW after hearing about TOTK and I know from multiple first hand accounts. And obviously there's nothing requiring people to play TOTK immediately after finishing BOTW.
 
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Octavian said:
yes and? I acknowledged that and it's not my point. Point is, I don't see a BOTW 3 having the same positive sales momentum from TOTK as people get tired of the formula and continue to critically re-evaluate TOTK past its launch honeymoon. The WOM/discourse is worse than BOTW from where I'm standing
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Despite reusing the map, TOTK did more to change up the "formula" than any of the prior to BOTW 3D Zeldas did from OOT, so this entire perspective that people are going to get tired of "the formula" any minute now doesn't make much sense in any reasonable context I can come up with.

I'm glad we're far removed from the days of sequels like wind waker where the new item list is "The Deku leaf and the grappling hook", and really the grappling hook was just a subpar hookshot, and everything else was cribbed entirely from OOT and used exactly the same way for the same puzzles.
 
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so odd to see people reacting in an inflationary way to people pointing out the obvious: TotK sales are way more front loaded and it didn't seem to sell bonkers-levels past its first quarter. whether this means team-BotW or team-TotK sell more in the end is yet to be seen obviously but, i don't think anyone in here is "shitting" on the sales of TotK.

if you conflate having a differing opinion on whether TotK will outsell BotW based off this info (and, in my case, predictions/thoughts held pre-the game even releasing) with outright flaming the game for selling "badly" in comparison, i think you're looking at the discussion in the wrong way.
 
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No numbers for Everybody 1-2-Switch!? So it didn’t even break one million? Damn… It’s a real shame that this game got screwed over so much by a leak reporting on the state of the game well before the finished project actually launched… It’s not the terrible game everyone thinks it is, and its use of mobile devices is actually pretty amazing and way more polished than its contemporaries (like Jackbox) and the concept has plenty of potential to be explored further but sadly Nintendo will likely give up on that direction with how poorly this game performed…
 


I think this tweet sums it up for me. As someone who works doing research and coding, the game does things that make it hard for me to visualize in how to adapt. That led to me experimenting an going back every few weeks to just have fun. It really is a part of game dev that is sometimes lost or taken for granted.


Regardless this thread reminds me why sales figures conversations are not great, cause it always boils down to people assuming a companies target projections.
 
I find the majority of the TotK discussion rather cringe lol. People are caring a little too much? 20M units is a lot. People get way too caught up in sales like it's a sport.

Anyways as for the most important game of the year, ahem, glad to see Pikmin 4 become the best selling game in the franchise. Doesn't surprise me really that it sold better in Japan than the rest of the world. Although, it is a little disappointing. I thought with the marketing strategy it had a chance to significantly expand it's appeal outside Japan. I kinda wonder if it having 4 in the title kind of held it back because people think they'd have to play the first 3 games to play this one. Or the series is just doomed to be sub 5M units seller where I have to pray I don't have to wait a decade for the next one.
 
mazi said:
missed the updated number for switch sports

  • Nintendo Switch Sports - 10.77M (+1.17M since March 2023)
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I've been pretty critical of this game in relation to Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, but I'm happy it's doing well. It's at least reassuring to know that the Wii Sports games weren't just some fad of the 2000s like many wrote them off as. This will at the very least guarantee a successor on Switch 2, where they can hopefully make improvements to bring it closer to Resort.
 
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I'm not buying into this narrative where Totk can still reach Botw due to overshipment, especially after Scarlet & Violet. The same arguments could be used to it since they overshipped 2.4 million copies.
Still:

Scarlet & Violet
Q1 - 20.61 overshipped by 2.4M
Q2 - 22.10 (+1.5M) stronger Q2 than Totk
Q3 - 22.66M (+560k)
Q4 - 23.23 (+557k)

Totk
Q1 - 18.51 overshipped by 2.8M
Q2 - 19.50 (+990k)

I think it's a good comparison as they both were overshipped, with explosive initial sales and came out when the Switch had a similar landscape.
If the overshipment has a impact it will be on making Totk holiday sales look worse.
Before the release a lot of people, myself included, expect explosive sales and then worse legs as it's a completely different platform moment. And I believe it's what's happening.
 
The framing of TOTK's "critical re-evaluation/honeymoon period is over" being this new thing for Zelda that visibly affects its reception and sales brings me back to a time when BOTW was such an unheard of critical firestorm that it felt like I'd commonly get into the most aggressive debates on the internet with people who were staunchly railing against convention flipping design choices like breakable weapons, non-traditional Zelda dungeons, Shrines, the dearth of bespoke design brought about by the open air formula, and more. Super Bunnyhop's critical review on the game dropped less than three weeks after launch, Joseph Anderson's 2 hour video essay was a little over a month after release.

If you don't think people were very quick to try turning discourse around on BOTW, you weren't there for it. So much did BOTW rub people the wrong way that the ripple effects of its perceived flaws bled into the discourse surrounding Elden Ring in 2022, and whether or not that game "vindicated" the criticisms people had of BOTW. But that's not just the Zelda cycle at this point, it's the 95+ Metacritic cycle.

balgajo said:
I'm not buying into this narrative where Totk can still reach Botw due to overshipment, especially after Scarlet & Violet. The same arguments could be used to it since they overshipped 2.4 million copies.
Still:

Scarlet & Violet
Q1 - 20.61 overshipped by 2.4M
Q2 - 22.10 (+1.5M) stronger Q2 than Totk
Q3 - 22.66M (+560k)
Q4 - 23.23 (+557k)

Totk
Q1 - 18.51 overshipped by 2.8M
Q2 - 19.50 (+990k)

I think it's a good comparison as they both were overshipped, with explosive initial sales and came out when the Switch had a similar landscape.
If the overshipment has a impact it will be on making Totk holiday sales look worse.
Before the release a lot of people, myself included, expect explosive sales and then worse legs as it's a completely different platform moment. And I believe it's what's happening.
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SV and TOTK comparisons are flawed because one of them launched going into the holiday period, TOTK hasn't had a holiday period yet.
 
Decoyman said:
SV and TOTK comparisons are flawed because one of them launched going into the holiday period, TOTK hasn't had a holiday period yet.
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That's almost irrelevant to comparing the two games. But, if anything, that's a negative against TOTKs performance because traditionally Jan-Mar is the weakest part of the year and ScarVios second quarter still did better than TOTKs.
 
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