This episode, released on September 26, was distributed in 2.58 million copies worldwide in five days, including 480,000 copies in Japan. The number of copies sold to consumers has not been disclosed, as Nintendo occasionally does. The performance is certainly not as strong as that of the remake of Link’s Awakening (3.13 million in 10 days), but it remains better than all the other Zeldas released on portable consoles, as Oscar Lemaire points out on Bluesky by illustrating his about with this comparative table. Remember that Nintendo took advantage of this release to market a Nintendo Switch Lite: Hyrule Edition. This collector’s console played its role perfectly since it allowed Nintendo to sell more consoles between July and September than between April and June.
While waiting for the results of Super Mario Party Jamboree and Mario & Luigi: The Brotherhood Epic, The Legend of Zelda : Echoes of Wisdom is set to be the biggest novelty of the year 2024 at Nintendo. The game is ahead of the remasters of Paper Mario: The Millennium Door and Luigi’s Mansion 2, which have respectively reached 1.94 million and 1.57 million copies distributed as of September 30, as indicated in Nintendo’s presentation .
An insufficient catalog to compare with last year, when Nintendo was riding high on the colossal successes of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the Super Mario film which, in addition to bringing in royalties, had boosted all of Mario game sales. For the April-September 2024 half-year, Nintendo therefore sold 4.72 million Switches (down 31%) and 70.28 million games (down 28%). Nothing shameful for such an old console, on the contrary, the Switch even demonstrates greater endurance at this stage than all other Nintendo platforms in history.
As a reminder, Nintendo still intends to formally announce the Switch 2 by the end of the fiscal year, that is to say no later than March 2025. According to feedback from developers recently collected by the journalist Chris Dring, the trend is towards a launch in Nintendo’s next fiscal year, which does not begin until April 2025.
« No developer I spoke with expects this to launch this financial year. In fact, they were told not to expect it to happen in the current fiscal year. Several people I spoke with hope that it will be April or May, so still quite early next year, and not too late “, he said in a podcast recorded last August.
- Also read | Nintendo has sold 146 million Switches but lowers its annual forecasts
- Also read | Le test de The Legend of Zelda : Echoes of Wisdom par Kelmazad
