Unless WW3 or something similarly drastic happens, Breath of the Wild will pass 10 million. It's a true killer app, the kind of game that will still be charting years from now.

I really hope that there is a tally released for revenue generated by GTA V once it finally stops selling. It's got to be in the running for the title of Biggest Anything Ever in terms of it's money making power.

-edit. Well, it was at "over 3 billion dollars" as of April 2016

Plenty of people bought the system based on the hype. Just like plenty of people bought the WiiU initially.

Oh I can understand that, I myself was a committed pessimist for a bit because I absolutely hate being disappointed. This is one of those instances though where it's a fairly safe bet; the game is selling like hotcakes, has overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, is one of the best reviewed games of all time, and is over a third of the way there as of its first month.

It's only flawed if you believe one variable being larger than another makes the latter irrelevant, which is not the case. I'm making no claims as to specifically how significant a variable it is (i don't believe we have enough data to come to firm conclusions, outside of "it clearly does something"), nor am i saying people are only buying Zelda because they don't have any choice. What i am saying is that if they had more choice, Zelda's sales could be lower. If the Switch launched with 10 AAA Nintendo games, do you think Zelda would have sold identically up until now? Either it would have sold less, or the other 9 would suffer in some capacity from Zelda's presence. I think we can agree the alternative (that people would buy all of the ones they want at the same time) isn't probably, and if that's the case you agree it's a relevant variable. I don't care if you think it's a small one, that's for you to judge, my problem is just someone dismissing it entirely.

If a PS4 game sells poorly we don't use that as proof that install base doesn't matter, so why would we claim a WiiU game selling poorly during a drought means library size doesn't? Just because another variables can trump it (in both those examples popularity), doesn't mean they aren't relevant, nor the dozens of others involved (marketing, digital, inaccurate sales tracking, critical reception, etc). As i said, for all we know Zelda might have done even better with a different combination of variables.

You had to go and jinx it.

Hey, if it does happen, we'll all get to play Fallout: Real Life Edition instead. ;)

In seriousness though, i agree. Zelda failing to reach 10m would be pretty shocking. Once it passes its initial phase of selling to people that explicitly want Zelda, i think we'll see it become like GTA5 in that a lot of new console buyers pick it up along with the system. Between its critical reception, good word of mouth, and initial success, its a safe bet for anyone interested in a Switch.

Saying "there are too many variables so you can't prove me wrong" is just lazy. It's also a gross underestimation of my willingness to waste my time.

There are certainly many variables affecting game sales: marketing, word of mouth, install base, market appeal, and more. We can control for those pretty easily! Let's look at the same game in the same market -- this eliminates almost all variables. If we look at the US alone, the install base of the PS4 and XBO are very close, and we can control for this even further.

Obviously my contention is that the PS4 has had several more major releases this year than the XBO and therefore according to you (and others) it has a 'variable' which would bring sales of all of its games down by an indeterminate amount. My own theory is that this makes the PS4 a healthy platform and it will either have no measurable effect on game sales or it will in fact benefit them.

We'll focus on the major multiplatform games released so far this year: Ghost Recon Wildlands, Resident Evil VII, For Honor, Mass Effect Andromeda, and Hitman, as well as a few smaller games, let's say Yooka-Laylee, Sniper Elite 4, and Telltale's The Walking Dead. Conventional wisdom would suggest that these smaller games would be more easily lost in the shuffle on PS4, so your unknown variable would benefit them on XBO.

Immediately we can observe that the PS4 version of every one of the eight games I named has outsold its XBO counterpart every single week this year, with very few exceptions (a couple of later weeks of For Honor, a few essential ties in the triple-digit range for the smaller games). From this we can conclude that your mystery variable is at least too weak to overcome the 10% install base difference.

But we can bypass the install base entirely by looking at tie ratio. The percentage of total platform userbase who bought each game in the US --

REVII PS4: 2.57%
REVII XBO: 1.61%

Wildlands PS4: 2.57%
Wildlands XBO: 2.58%

For Honor PS4: 2.09%
For Honor XBO: 1.76%

Andromeda PS4: 1.90%
Andromeda XBO: 1.72%

Hitman PS4: 0.62%
Hitman XBO: 0.46%

Trust me that the other three continue this trend. An easier way to illustrate this would be to simply point out that despite only a 10% difference in install base, the PS4 has sold more than 15% more software than the XBO this year. The release of major exclusives like MLB The Show, Persona 5, Horizon, Kingdom Hearts, Nioh, and Nier Automata had no observable impact on sales of other software. If I was to conclude a trend from the figures I've measured, I'd decide that the frequent pace of releases has cultivated a healthy platform that is more beneficial to smaller releases.

I'm sure that if Nintendo flooded the Switch with major first-party exclusives week after week they would eventually hit some kind of breaking point, causing their games to start stepping on each others' sales, especially since supply constraints are a factor. But I'm not convinced that Zelda would have suffered if Mario Kart had released a few weeks earlier.

When did I say people didn't? Stop getting sensitive