I have that one too, it's the one I played through, good old left handed link :D it's graphically an amazing feat for the GC to have pulled off so perfectly.

Friends, when discussing Twilight Princess sales, you have heard it parrotted that the sales of TP were propelled by the discovery of the Twilight Hack.

Well ladies and gents, I am here to inform you that that is false.

Most of you know that the sales of Twilight Princess amount to 8.17M as per vgchartz' figures.

For certain, 1.6M of TP GC sales were not generated by the TP hack, which is exlusive to the Wii.

But that's not the main argument. In recent observation of the sales trends, I am pleased to inform you that likely more than 90% of Wii sales are not due to the TP hack (I can concede a negligeable 10% of TP Wii sales as an overhead value to the curves).

A quick glance at the curves offered by the tools on VGChartz, it becomes apparent that TP sold the majority of its copies during the holiday season and the lingering weeks that follow. The premice of my proof against the TP hack sales fallacy is that hackers don't necessarily buy hacker tools during the christmas season, they have no reason to. The christmas season is generally a time of sales for families and their children, who are generally not part of the hacker scene. Without further ado, the graphs:

You might notice there are a few minor bumps in the body of the 2007 year. Those are due to the fact that the Wii was supply constrained for the majority of 2007 and also followed a similar curve, so it's no surprise that a hit Wii game like Twilight Princess follow that curve for its growing consumerbase in its entirety (not just hackers).

As you can see from the cummulative sales, TP Wii follows a similar curve to any Nintendo evergreen title, with periodic sales jumps during holiday seasons. For an example of another game following this pattern, see Mario Kart Wii.

The explosions are more pronounced and the initial explosion is relatively not as big as for TP, but the christmas effect can be seen in full value here.

Post your thoughts on this data, hopefully this is debunked once and for all.

More reasoning:

Also, if most people bought the hack with their Wiis, there should be a similar curve between the Wii HW sales and the TP SW sales curves. Yet we don't see that happening.

If you look at the Wii versus TP Wii weekly sales curve, you see very different curves. Example: The sales of TP should go up in Jan 2010 Wii sales spike, but it doesn't.

Also worth noting is that it appears Twilight Princess may have stolen sales from Skyward Sword this past holiday season. I suspect kids were just asking for "Zelda for Wii", and parents were all, "oh look, THAT one (TP) is much cheaper than THAT one (SS), let's get the cheap one!"

SS likely also bumped TP sales without them being stolen, but not as much as that shows. Just having a related game available for less than $20 new causes people to go ahead and buy both.

Exactly. Who in their right minds would buy a full retail game to hack their consoles at 60$+ when they can rent the game at a fraction of the costs and still perform the hack.

People who live in shit places like Ireland where xtra vision is the only real brick and mortar rental place, the only games they put out for rent are copies of things that didn't sell in the bargin bin for about 5 months at 5euros and then they start trying to rent them for 6euros for 5 days  :D awful awful store.

I think you'll find these guys attributed to sales of TP too because it's such a cat friendly game :D sorry for the mindless cat pics, but there is 2 of them, they take turns to make sure the sound of licking is up 24 hours, also I put something in the pic so you know the scale :D the one that isn't black is massive about 3 times the size of the other thing and he is half her age.

http://imgur.com/Qn4BX

http://imgur.com/blS5m

but! mad pics aside, I guess the thing is, when it came to this hack it kinda encouraged people to buy it, but for myself at least I didn't mind an excuse to add a great game to my collection and the other reason I wouldn't just rent or borrow it to hack the wii, I collect games I have maybe... 2000 or so games from every system since the 2600 I've not ever had a game and gotten rid of it (with the notable exceptions of tekken 6[awful and got it at launch wanted cash back that day] and michael owens world league soccer for the psone [got thrown off a wall])

Hehehe, I think he's loving TP the grey one. :3 Black one is so small and cuddly.

I love animals. The only thing is I am allergic to dogs and cats :(

aye have a friend who's the same way, he loves um but if he pets them and puts his hands anywhere near his face he just swells up to the point he can barely see after a while, just from being in our house at this stage it happens slowly even if they're not in the room so if we're playing street fighter or Melee for a few hours as the time passes he tends to lose more games :D but ye, I like animals always had one around, from a Red setter dog while younger to a cat always next to me during my gaming years. And aye! even cats love TP :D but I definately see your points here, the game might have been affected a tiny bit, but I would think that around 95% are probably legit sales of the game where people might know it was useful to hack it, but also knew it was an amazing game and maybe just 1% of the copies ended up being used just for hacking and were chucked on a heap after.