Tears of the Kingdom is already the second-bestselling Zelda game
Nintendo’s latest quarterly investor report reveals that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sold 18.51 million copies in the seven weeks between its release on May 12 and June 30. That makes it easily the second-best-selling game in the Zelda series, after its predecessor Breath of the Wild (which now stands at over 30 million copies sold).
In fact, it was never really in doubt that Tears of the Kingdom would reach this milestone. The 10 million copies it sold over its launch weekend put it ahead of every other individual Zelda release. But if you rolled up sales of their various reissues, then Link’s Awakening (12 million copies sold across Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Switch versions) and Ocarina of Time (14 million copies sold across the Nintendo 64 original and the 3DS remaster) were still ahead at that time. No more.
The feat underlines the extent to which Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma’s dynamic, open-world redefinition of Zelda games has revolutionized the series’ commercial appeal (helped along by the success of the Nintendo Switch platform). Although a beloved Nintendo property, and a critically revered cornerstone of the video game medium, Zelda was never really a sales juggernaut before Breath of the Wild.
Now, Tears of the Kingdom has joined the list of the top ten best-selling Switch games, and will certainly climb higher than its current ninth position in the coming months — perhaps even eclipsing the sales of the Switch’s mainline Pokémon games, Sword and Shield (25.9 million), and Scarlet and Violet (22.7 million).
The release also did its part to revive flagging sales of the Switch. Nintendo reported that sales of the console were up 14% compared to the same quarter last year, almost all of
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