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AddRat on 05 March 2025
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Kyuu said:
Wyrdness said:

On sales I doubt that as front loaded or not Nintendo's titles have shown massive legs and with TOTK is at 21m and counting it's a big task especially with the fact that the won't be a new mainline Zelda for a while and that Switch 2 will have BC BOTW after all is still selling at 33m, also the competition argument is outdated here as Switch has one of the best libraries of any platform ever released buying primarily for first party titles doesn't equate to people not buying other titles truth is TOTK sold because it's in the same boat as games like GTA. On Growth I disagree Zelda averaged 4m before BOTW with the only exceptions being the original, OOT and TP, this is the same sales average as MH pre-World to pass one off as more impressive is a bit much as the growth is almost identical.

@Sephiran 

PC isn't smaller than people think Wilds did better than World I'd speculate PC has likely grown significantly for MH with PC players from World returning as well as the likelihood that some Xbox players have migrated over.


Software sales, spending, and f2p engagement on Steam and Playstation are greater than Switch. Switch's playerbase (which is larger than Playstation's and probably not far behind Steam) is more concentrated across a smaller range of key titles and that's just a fact. I made no claim that 3rd party games don't sell on Switch.

Monster Hunter's growth is undeniably greater than Zelda's all things considered. Your sales average metric is misleading and leaves out important details. MH World was expected to sell 1.5-3 million lifetime, because the last and most successful home console MH game prior to World sold poorly outside Japan (Tri). World will sell over 30 million, the vast majority of which outside Japan. Every first mainline Zelda game sold quite well. Particularly Zelda 1 with 6.5 million, Ocarina of Time with 7.5+ million (on a tiny install base at that), Twilight Princess with 9 million, and BotW with 35+ million. 2nd Zelda games within a generation always sold worse than the first and that theme is going to continue with TotK unless they "DX" it. Wilds should beat it, especially if ported to Switch 2.

Beyond sales, Zelda always had a special significance as one of the most influential and greatest game franchises of all time. Monster Hunter, even the portable line, was niche outside Japan.

The first ever Zelda game sold over 6.5 million (which is massive for its time). The first Monster Hunter game sold less a million including Japan, the odd region where Monster Hunter quickly became huge. The more angles you consider, the more obvious it is that Monster Hunter's growth is on a completely different level. Zelda's growth is more in line with God of War and Spider-Man's.


While I agree with your take on the comparison, I think that you are placing the segmented audience of pre-World MH it too much of a focus here when talking about the IP in general. The people who, at least initially, bought World were most likely a largely different audience than the Japanese and handheld-centric most popular MH games up to that point but latter audience needs to accounted anyways since we are talking about IP growth.

PSP titles ended up with quite high numbers, especially for their time, by the last entries with almost 4m million in the case of Unite and almost 5 million for MHP3rd.

Same for the 3DS titles, with 4U and Gen reaching 4.2 and 4.3 respectively. Now, as I said before, World's audience is mostly different people, even by definition, as IIRC, Tri's 1million western sales were the most the series had sold up until then in the west with probably only 4U topping it (or GU). But those sales should be counted into the IPs status at the time.

Still, Worlds sales were explosive, especially taking into account that the cultural relevance of Zelda has been much greater throughout generations and its previous peaks also much higher.