The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild – making a success of the Switch

The Nintendo Switch enjoyed Nintendo’s biggest ever hardware launch in the US, and the second biggest since NPD records began.

According to the latest NPD results, Nintendo Switch launch title The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild was the second bestselling video game last month in the US – with retail sales of over 900,000 copies.

It still had to play second fiddle to Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but it did beat PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn – which was released only a few days earlier.

As ever though the US charts are full of omissions and caveats, with the Zelda figure not including digital sales and combining Wii U and Switch as one. And that’s ignoring the fact that the whole chart is organised by revenue instead of units sold, which is not how it works anywhere else in the world.




Even the way chart-tracker NPD categorises games is slightly bizarre, as they’ve decided that both Zelda and Resident Evil count as ‘adventures’ and so have revealed that Breath Of The Wild made 54% more money than Resident Evil 7 at launch.

Slightly more useful information is that as a whole physical Switch software sales stood at 1.3 million units, which is apparently a record high for a Nintendo console launch.

Most of those sales are clearly just Zelda, with 1-2-Switch only making it as high as number 13 and having an attach rate of just 19%. Fellow Switch exclusive Super Bomberman R was the third biggest seller, making it to number 17.

The only hint of how well the Switch itself sold is that it managed 31,000 more sales than the Game Boy Advance, which previously held the record for Nintendo’s best launch in the US. The Switch was also the best-selling console of the month, ahead of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

‘March 2017 will go down in history books as the month Nintendo broke records. The Nintendo Switch had the biggest hardware launch for a Nintendo platform and the second biggest launch for any video game platform since 1995, the time NPD began tracking this category’, said NPD analyst Sam Naji.

It may have been one of the least critically acclaimed of the year’s big releases, but as you can see Ghost Recon: Wildlands has been just as big a hit in America as it has in the rest of the world.

It had the best ever launch for a Ghost Recon game and the second best ever for a Tom Clancy game, behind only The Division. It’s also the second best-selling game of the year as a whole, ahead of For Honor and Zelda: Breath Of The Wild.

In terms of other new releases Mass Effect: Andromeda debuted at number three, but with a smaller launch than Mass Effect 3. That’s actually better than in the UK though, where the game was also beaten by Mass Effect 2.

There’s no information on exactly how well Horizon Zero Dawn did, other than it sold twice as much as Killzone 2 – which up till now has been developer Guerrilla Games’ biggest debut.



The most heart-warming news from the charts though is that NieR: Automata made it to number nine, which given how busy the month was is very encouraging. Especially as Square Enix has already hinted that they may work with developer Platinum Games again.

U.S. all formats chart – March 1 (-) Ghost Recon: Wildlands (XO/PS4/PC)

2 (-) The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild (Wii U/NS)

3 (-) Mass Effect: Andromeda (XO/PS4/PC)

4 (-) Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4)

5 (-) MLB 17: The Show (PS4)

6 (3) Grand Theft Auto V (360/PS3/XO/PS4/PC)

7 (1) For Honor (XO/PS4/PC)

8 (4) NBA 2K17 (360/PS3/XO/PS4/PC)

9 (-) NieR: Automata (PS4)

10(5) Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare (XO/PS4/PC)

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