Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 539 posts

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#341

Post by yamtaddle »

hospitalJail wrote: post #5

The marketing was insane as usual. Nintendo performed excellent. Multiple front page reddit posts, multiple 10/10 reviews from big name outlets. Nintendo rivals Apple as the best company in marketing. Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings…

> Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints

I've put in about 15 hours and haven't noticed it. I've sorta been looking, too, because I read everyone complaining about it on here before I picked up the game. But I keep getting distracted by... playing the game.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#343

Post by edgyquant »

zeta0134 wrote: post #158
edgyquant wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has basically never been a Zelda game that wasn’t amazing. Also this is a sequel to a game that people were buying before they even had a switch (because switches were hard to get for the first year or so.) So yeah, everyone assumed it’d be an amazing game and it is.

For your enjoyment, may I present: "Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_CD-i_games But for more official games, I find Phantom Hourglass to be the weakest entry in the series. It's... fine? Painfully easy and loaded with padding.

Yeah I thought of adding this caveat, but I don’t consider it a mainline Zelda game and basically no one has played it.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#344

Post by fugalfervor »

Closi wrote: post #133
speeder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong there. Nintendo instead been always pushing the tech. The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power. Mario 64 is credited along with Wing Commander for creating the AAA graphics race at all costs behavior in the industry. The Wii wasn't entirely a direction change, Nintendo felt competing on CPU power now was not interesting and went for motion c…

Neither the Wii, Wii U or Switch have anything powerful from a hardware perspective - the last time Nintendo released a product equally powered to the competition was the Game Cube but that was over 22 years ago now. This is the 'withered technologies' playbook in action - use underpowered/mature technology in new and fun ways rather than relying on cutting-edge graphics technologies. As an example when the switch wa…

The classic example of this from Nintendo's toymaker days is a remote controlled toy car that only turns left. It was cheaper for them to make it that way and you can still race cars around a track.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#345

Post by gameman144 »

byby wrote: post #235
sharatvir wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wii is basically a slightly more powerful GameCube with novel controls. It competed with (and outsold) the ps3 and xbox360 which offered HD visuals and integrated online play.

If you're a gamer though you know there were problems with the console. The appeal was to a very casual audience and that's why it sold well.

I play lots of games and I liked the Wii, and bought one.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#346

Post by munificent »

mrguyorama wrote: post #143
arnaudsm wrote: post #8

It is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year. Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.

Is it really that impressive that focusing on game design results in a better game than spending a billion dollars on a thousand artists so that every tree can have ten times as many polygons and each texture is 16kX16k? Better graphics rarely actually IMPROVE a game, and can do nothing to fix a game that was designed poorly. AAA studios whine and cry about how expensive games are to make (completely glossing over th…

I agree with your general point but I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is a good example of it.

They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also, they really are getting as much detail and graphic complexity as they possibly can out of that little machine.

This isn't some cheap 2D pixel art game that spent their whole budget on game mechanics. It's a AAA game that maxed out their budget along every single axis. They just happened to target hardware with lower specs.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#347

Post by AbsoluteCabbage »

arnaudsm wrote: post #8

It is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year. Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.

> Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything

More like- Nintendo proved that in spite of barely listening to the fan base over literal decades, a solid brand will still get sales with just bleh content.

They barely caught onto the open world concept and sandbox - and it took years and years.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#348

Post by lucky_cloud »

candiddevmike wrote: post #37
veryfancy wrote: post #3

...and it's actually very good.

Is it? It plays like a clone of the first game without a lot of meaningful improvements over the criticisms of the first. Weapons still break, the story still sucks, the dungeons aren't dungeons... It plays more like Minecraft. I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.

> Weapons still break

That is a feature, not a flaw. They improved the feature in TOTK with Fuse. Now you're forced to try out hundreds of different weapons. You could play for ages and not use the same weapon twice.

Compare to something like Elden Ring, where I felt like the game was almost discouraging me from trying out different weapons. You have to sink so much into a build that just kicking the tires on a different kind of weapon is almost impossible. It's almost guaranteed to feel underpowered.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#349

Post by dllthomas »

racl101 wrote: post #339
arnaudsm wrote: post #8

It is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year. Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.

Absolutely. Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable. Zelda games, especially cell animation ones tend to age so well. Like WindWaker on the Game Cube. Such an amazing and fun game even on almost 20 year old hardware. For all the amazing hardware on PS5 and Xbox Series ... most games releases are barely even an event that register in the cultural zeitgeist. A few exceptions exist of course. B…

> Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.

I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro.

Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I am optimistic.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#350

Post by kettlecorn »

kramerger wrote: post #332
kettlecorn wrote: post #187

I'm often discouraged by comments on Hacker News that downplay the importance of great design in a design-heavy medium. This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!). It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda ent…

Counterpoint: Ask random old gamer to list his top 5 games. Chances are at least two will be zelda games. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13jurfi/only_8_game...

That's not a counterpoint. More serious gamers have always loved Zelda and the series has always sold well amongst that audience.

But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.

Post reply on HN