Pokémon Legends: Arceus outsells Sword/Shield with 6.5 million copies in less than a week

metro.co.uk:

Phenomenal sales all but guarantee the next Pokémon game will take major influences from Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

Being a new Pokémon game, Pokémon Legends: Arceus was always going to be a sales success. In the UK, it managed to dethrone Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and take the number one spot in the charts.

Now, Nintendo of America has provided more tangible figures, revealing on Twitter that more than 6.5 million copies have been sold worldwide since it released last week.

Compare this to Pokémon Sword/Shield, which collectively sold over 6 million copies in their first week of release. While the Pokémon Let’s Go games managed over 3 million within the same timeframe.

Considering there is only one Pokémon Legends game as opposed to two, this makes its feat especially impressive and serves as another reminder that the franchise’s more vocal detractors are ultimately a minority.

So, what does this mean for the future of the series? The obvious assumption is that the next mainline games, aka Generation IX, will take influence from Pokémon Legends.

After all, Pokémon Let’s Go introduced having wild pokémon appear physically on the map, which was then implemented into Pokémon Sword/Shield and led to the creation of the Wild Area.

It’s too soon to tell if the next set of games will adopt the same semi-open world formula, but at the very least you should expect it to carry over some of the quality-of-life changes Pokémon Legends introduced.

Either that or this will mark the start of a new sub-series, with future Legends games expanding on its mechanics and focus on completing the pokédex while the mainline games retain the usual ‘become the champion’ through line.

Hopefully, whatever form the next game takes, it will be a step up in the