After a six-year break, Nintendo has released another installment in its successful Zelda video game series. The Japanese games group is dependent on a new sales success.
The video game company Nintendo today released a new installment in its legendary Zelda series. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom went on sale at midnight. The game is among the industry’s most anticipated releases this year.
Because of the time difference, the Japanese video game fans got their turn first, followed by the European ones seven hours later. From Tokyo to Paris, queues formed hours before stores opened at night because of the Zelda release.
“We’ve been waiting for this game for six years,” said 19-year-old student Taylor Meguira, who paused outside a video game store in Paris Thursday night. “The Zelda games have been a part of my childhood and my entire life to this day,” said 18-year-old Emilie Sastre.
Lots of freedom for the players
“Tears of the Kingdom” revolves around the adventures of Princess Zelda and the elf warrior Link and was first released in 1986 as “The Legend of Zelda”. The various parts of the saga that have appeared since then have collectively sold over 125 million copies worldwide.
The series is considered a milestone in the development of so-called open-world games. Games in an open world allow a lot of freedom to shape the gaming experience. The players largely decide for themselves how they want to explore the often huge maps of virtual worlds.
With the most recently released Zelda game “Breath of the Wild” from 2017, Nintendo again achieved enormous sales success, and critics were also positive. It has sold 29 million copies to date.
Management expects downtrend
That’s why the expectations of the successor are correspondingly high – not only among the players. Nintendo also has high hopes for the release. Serkan Toto, analyst at Kantan Games, expects “Tears of a Kingdom” to be by far “the biggest contributor to Nintendo’s sales this year”.
In the past financial year, revenues fell by 5.5 percent to 10.8 billion euros. The operating result fell by almost 15 percent to 3.4 billion euros.
Management recently warned that this downward trend would continue: Sales of the Switch games console are expected to fall in 2023/2024 from 17.97 million in the previous year to 15 million, the company announced last Tuesday.
The competition submitted
The game console is the basis of the Nintendo business because more devices used also lead to higher sales of the in-house game titles. And the more successful and successful the individual game titles are, the greater the chance that they will promote sales of the switch. Finally, players need the right console to play the game.
The player base of the Switch, which can be used on the home TV but is also portable, is by far the broadest of the current generation of consoles, with around 125 million units sold. After the Playstation 2, the Switch, which is in its seventh year of production, is the second best-selling console of all time.
For comparison: the current Playstation 5 from Sony, like Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S, came onto the market at the end of 2020 and has been sold around 40 million times so far, the Xbox Series X/S around 21 million times. The Switch, which is considered “more family-friendly” due to the range of games, came onto the market in March 2017 and is technically inferior to the competing products.
When is the Switch successor coming?
Therefore, it is currently at least obvious for potential buyers to wait for a new generation of Nintendo consoles. At least that’s what the slowing sales indicate. And that’s how Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa sees it: “It’s difficult for sales of switch hardware and software to keep up the same pace,” he said on the occasion of Nintendo’s balance sheet presentation.
Industry experts are not expecting a successor to the Switch this year. An introduction of a “Switch 2” or a completely new hardware can be ruled out in this financial year, means analyst Serkan Toto. Customers will have to be patient until at least 2024.
With information from Thomas Spinnler, ARD finance department.