Zelda has always been a series that performs better in Western markets. Japan, which has been steering further away from more traditional console gaming, has never really been a huge fan of the series. So imagine the surprise when mynintendonews.com reported that Breath of the Wild “currently stands at 935,835 copies sold in Japan.”
These sales numbers are truly a testament to both the power of the Switch and the overall ability of a game to revolutionize things so much that it actually becomes a console seller. As bigger games have begun to shift more towards multiplayer markets in the past few years, people have been worried that the single-player game experiences many of us grew up with are slowly being phased out. However, as we can see from the success of games like Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, and Persona 5, this simply isn’t true.
Much like Super Mario Bros. for the NES or Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis back in the day, there is a market for big-name, single-player killer apps even in a world where games like PUBG and Overwatch also dominate a large amount of the space. Seeing a single-player game rock the boat this hard is a pleasant reminder that a big-budget single player market is still alive and well.
