Figures as legendary as its title. The video game series The Legend of Zelda or, more simply, Zelda was enriched on Friday May 12 with a new opus called Tears of the Kingdom. No doubt it will be a commercial success for the Japanese firm Nintendo: in France alone, Fnac Darty forecasts at least 350,000 sales. By way of comparison, the other phenomenon of the moment, Elden Ring, sold some 302,000 copies in 2022, and pokemon scarlet, to 300,000 units (excluding digital).
At the global level, too, profits look set to be record high. “Tears of the Kingdom will be by far the biggest contributor to Nintendo’s sales for the coming year,” Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games, told AFP.
125 million games in the franchise Zelda sold
These predictions are not surprising. Thirty-seven years after its creation by Shigeru Miyamoto, to whom we also owe Super Mario Or Donkey Kong, Zelda understood the recipe for success. The license has sold nearly 125 million games worldwide since its inception. Result: Nintendo estimated in 2021 that it had already generated more than 6 billion euros in revenue, between the sale of games, associated consoles and derivative products.
Further proof of its importance: Zelda broke the record for the most expensive video game sold in the world. In 2021, a cartridge still in a blister dating from 1987 was sold for 870,000 dollars (around 800,000 euros) at an auction in the United States. The record has since been held by a cartridge of Super Mario 64, sold for 1.56 million dollars (about 1.43 million euros).
Boost sales of the Switch console
Continuing its momentum, Zelda achieved a new masterstroke in 2017 with the release of Breath of the Wild. This episode, launched at the same time as the Switch console, had sold 29 million units. It is currently the best-selling franchise. Six years later, Nintendo intends to smash this record: the company hopes that Tears of the Kingdom will be able to revive sales of the Switch, already in its seventh year of marketing.
These suffer from a decline in volume of 22%, according to the annual results presented by the firm for the 2022-2023 financial year. And the trend should not start rising again: they are expected to fall by 16.5% over the 2023-2024 financial year. Nintendo however exceeded its objectives, with a net profit of 2.9 billion euros and a turnover of 10.8 billion euros.
According to Serkan Toto, Tears of the Kingdom could “attract both customers who have never had a Switch and users who will buy the version with a better screen for this game”. But Nintendo remains cautious: many analysts believe that, in the absence of major titles planned for the next few months, Zelda will not be enough to stem the decline in sales, after the record reached by the Switch in 2020, when the confined world rushed to video games.