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Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

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

#361

Post by throwaway_75369 »

ericzawo wrote: post #66
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 been the gimped hardware in the marketplace for, what, 30+ years now? This is not surprising.

Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).

The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.

You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though

A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.

Edit: bad at math

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

#362

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

ggregoire wrote: post #353

I wonder what would be those sales if the game was released on PC too. Like they obviously make it exclusive to the Switch to sell more consoles. But I'll never buy that console (or any console, really) just to play this game, or even to play 10 games as good as this one. I imagine tons of PC gamers are in my case. I heard the game runs quite well on a Switch emulator and it was getting massively downloaded via torre…

Same here, it's a shame they don't support the PC market. I bought the game for my wife to play on Switch, but I'm playing it at 4k 60fps on my desktop via Yuzu with my saves being synced to my steamdeck which can emulate the game at 1080p and 25-40fps.

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

#363

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

> spending a billion dollars on a thousand artists so that every tree can have ten times as many polygons and each texture is 16kX16k

Absolute realism is a tedious goal.

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

#364

Post by majormajor »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #185
tm-guimaraes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics? No money involved. It's as much gambling as going to random.org and guess a random invocation. It's as much gambling as random encuonters on JRPGs, or quest/mission rewards, or really anything else in gaming with random chance. Is catching a pokemon in any pokemon game a gacha mechanic? You use a pokeball and might or might not get the pokemon. What about any game…

TotK's in-game mechanic literally operates like a gachapon machine. You insert something (a facsimile of a coin), out comes a capsule with something random in it. Softening kids to the mechanics of gacha isn't good. Furthermore, you completely dismissed the rest of my comment and what I was responding to. Pokemon Masters is definitely a gacha game, so maybe there's a progression there in terms of where this is headin…

"Softening kids to the mechanics of gacha isn't good."

Let's go back a hundred years or so and ban gumball machines and half of the machines in arcades, then...

In this case you're describing a randomization game mechanic as gambling. How deterministic must a game be to avoid that, then?

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

#365

Post by jjice »

First party Nintendo (at least mainline Zelda and Mario) are all about quality. You might wait six years between games, but it'll always be worth it. I haven't had a "I wish I wasn't working so I could play this game" in years, but I have it now with TOTK and I couldn't be happier. Neglecting sleep to play just one more hour - I feel like a kid again.

They've always squeezed a ton out of the hardware they have, especially since the Wii, which, in my head at least, is when they started being notably behind hardware wise.

I'm just glad that they're a fantastic example of a company that really prioritizes quality over quantity.

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

#366

Post by cheald »

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…

I disagree; Zelda games have always been a major draw for Nintendo audiences. Link to the Past was the best-selling game of 1991; Link's Awakening - released in 1993 on the Gameboy - was a defining game for Nintendo at the time and was directly responsible for a massive uptake in Gameboy sales (and was the best-selling game of the year.) OoT was an absolutely industry-defining success; it was the best-selling game of 1998, and it's the highest-rated video game of all time on Metacritic. Zelda games have always moved consoles and sold well; in terms of Nintendo's unit-movers, it's second only to Mario.

Of course the raw numbers look more impressive for BotW - there are 122m Switch units worldwide (and 30m BotW sales), but the N64 only shipped 33m units worldwide over its 8-year lifespan, and OoT still sold 7.6m copies (with another 6.4m on the 3DS).

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

#367

Post by hospitalJail »

bspammer wrote: post #271
byby wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game is that good. But holistically speaking the GP is right. Nintendo's success as a company is due in major part to it's up and marketing.

I’m kind of amazed that Nintendo continues to put as much effort into their first party games as they do. They could probably get away with phoning it in and releasing a crappy mainline Zelda/Mario game annually, because as you say their marketing is so strong. Instead they take 6 years to make an excellent sequel. Every Pokémon game seems to be worse than the last, and every single one breaks sales records. I’m very…

>They could probably get away with phoning it in and releasing a crappy mainline Zelda/Mario game annually

Idk, it sure seems like they have been phoning it in. At least if you compare to their quality 20 years ago.

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

#368

Post by flanbiscuit »

ecliptik wrote: post #153
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.

There's a Game Maker's Toolkit video [1] that does a good job explaining how Nintendo focuses on play first. "That's how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow" - Shigeru Miyamoto 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6HTG8LuXQ

To add this I recommend people watch Shigeru Miyamoto's 1999 GDC Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9DlhDRZ0yA

They also take into consideration the limitations of the hardware from the very beginning, and not just the engineers, but the designers as well.

"...Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably. "

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

#369

Post by gwill »

agnos wrote: post #245
faitswulff wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did make an amazing game: Breath of the Wild. They’re continuing to reap the profits from it.

This. They made BotW to sell the Switch, and this sequel doesn't add any novel elements to it. This game deserves the success if BotW didn't exist, but as a sequel the hype is pure marketing. If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.

fyi, BotW was actually made for WiiU. They ported it to switch and did a double release.

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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