@curl-6 The fact that it's surpassed Mario Odyssey and SWSH (and SV likely won't pass it either) is even more unthinkable. Not to mention the fact that it's going to outsell the original Pokemon games and could come with in a couple million of Super Mario Bros. Excluding ports, remakes and other re-releases, no Zelda game before this ever reached 10 million. Now we have on that just crossed 30 million and another that should do it in short order.

Yeah the sheer magnitude of BOTW's success relative to the series' three decades of prior history is insane.

It's already sold more than Twilight Princess, (Wii and Gamecube) Ocarina of Time, (N64 and 3DS) and the NES original combined, (the three previous top selling games in the franchise) and it's still moving at speed.

It's not a flash in the pan either as Tears of the Kingdom is maintaining the new sales standard.

Honestly that bolded part is simply not true anymore. BotW is over 30m and still selling well. Only the original Pokemon has sold more, and by the end of the year BotW will have surpassed it. And very possible TotK passes both Sw/Sh lifetime, meaning the top three sales places between the two series will probably be 1. Zelda 2. Pokemon 3. Zelda. The days of Pokemon outselling Zelda are over (at least for now).

Switch had 5 Pokemon games in less than 7 years. The three side games are gonna end up around 15-16m range, and the two mainline games are gonna end up in the 25-26m range. Those 5 games will probably end up around at 98-100 million. I don't think Nintendo is worried.

Should Nintendo start making sure Pokemon hits a certain quality level...yes absolutely. But Pokemon has sold PHENOMENALLY on Switch so it's not like Pokemon sales are disappointing anyone. Sure, as the first open world pokemon, if V/S had been a masterpiece instead of a bug-fest, and probably if they hadn't just released TWO other Pokemon games in the prior 12 months, it could have sold 30+ million. But then again they're gonna end up with probably 56-57m sales on 3 pokemons released within 12 months of one another. Nintendo ain't ever gonna complain from a sales perspective about Pokemon this gen.

Side note / pokemon scheduling rant:

These latest pokemon launches were just poorly timed. They threw out Arceus right after BD/SP because they had to stick to their 3-year mainline cycle, and it wouldn't have made sense to hold the partially open world Arceus until after the fully open world V/S came out because that would look like a step back. So Arceus needed to come out with at least some lead time before V/S, but that squashed BD/SP and Arceus together, with still not much time between them and V/S. Nintendo and the Pokemon Company should have broke their 3 year mainline cycle, and done BD/SP holiday '21 as they did, but then done Arceus holiday '22 (with more dev time put in), and then V/S as the big holiday title this year to hit after Mario Wonder.

Arceus would have been a huge holiday title and likely be a 20m+ seller if it had 12 months instead of 2 months separation from BD/SP, plus more dev time to polish it a bit more, plus didn't get cut off like three weeks after release by the announcement of V/S coming later in the year. BD/SP mighta picked up an extra million or two sales as well. Then with an extra year to significantly polish and improve V/S and selling on release to an even larger user base V/S might have hit 30m even with the other two games picking up an additional probably 6-7 million sales.

But no, Pokemon MUST stick to its 3 year schedule. With increasing graphical fidelity now that Pokemon games are on Nintendo's powerful 'console' system rather than the underpowered handhelds of yesteryear, and if the games are going to be open world now, they absolutely NEED to extend their mainline schedule to at least 4 years if they don't want every game to be even more of a buggy mess than V/S was at launch. The games will still sell well, but the series will gradually lose favor if they don't increase the dev cycle.

yeah Zelda games now outselling 3D Mario, Pokemon, and maaaaaaaybe even Smash or at least keeping pace with Smash is truly crazy. Open world Zelda not only brought the series back to being critically acclaimed the way it hasn't been basically since OoT, but has unleashed Zelda for as a sales behemoth. And no doubt with tech improvements next gen the open world design of Zelda will only get far more impressive in the next game.

Yeah few franchises have ever achieved this kind of explosion, much less after 30 years of existing as a highly acclaimed and well known series with good to decent sales.

BOTW's reinvention of the series may not be to everyone's taste, but the results cannot be refuted; Zelda is vastly more popular as an open world sandbox of systems-driven emergent gameplay than it ever was a more structured series of puzzle boxes.

And that's just software sales; its power as a system seller is arguably behind only Mario Kart and Animal Crossing now.

Holy crap I just realized something; if we include the Wii U version (and soon we won't even have to do that) BOTW has sold more than Pokemon Red/Green/Blue, the highest selling game in the series.

JFC, imagine trying to tell someone in 2015/16 that the next Zelda game would outsell every Pokemon game, you'd be called insane.