Did you miss the bolded part? That doesn't mean "not mainstream period". So could you respond to my actual point, not what you think I wrote.

I agree with you there.  I feel like the newer games just haven't appealed to those people as much, and they are unable to divorce their feelings of the series from a discussion of its mainstream appeal.  Or really any discussion about it.

In fact, that pretty much goes for every game ever.  This generation's Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and the like have just exposed that plain as day.

What is your point then?

noname hold on a second BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

Okay let me wipe my mouth now

Whew.

That fails to take into consideration the question of mainstream acceptance of video games, how different demographics respond to games differently, a split in the hardware market dividing the userbase (if all the potential HD-owning Zelda buyers owned Wiis, hoo boy - which they owuld, if the Wii were as big as the NES in terms of marketshare), on and on and on

His justification for his stance does not hold.

"Phenomena" cannot be measured.

And, again, that reasoning doesn't acknowledge a userbase split - every game owned an Atari 2600, every gamer owned an NES. Less than half of current gamers (far, far less, since the handheld vs. console split is so enormous) own a Wii. Pretending that Zelda should appeal to people enough to make the buy a Wii in a vacuum in a volume that works when adjusted for population growth doesn't make sense.

Ugh... if we applied Malstrom's Zelda logic to Metroid Prime, what's that say about it's sales?  How much would DKCR need to sell to be a "success" compared to DKC?

I agree that it's not a perfect stance,* but I also think some of your problems with his explanation are off. 

I'm not positive what you mean by "mainstream acceptance of video games," but if you mean "there are now more gamers" then that supports rather than contradicts his stance. That's exactly what he's saying with the "adjust for population growth, added markets (i.e. all of Europe), and increased disposible income." portion:  there are more potential gamers now than there was back in the NES days, so the absolute numbers should be higher.

The part about the hardware market being divided also supports his thesis: the theory goes that Zelda used to be one of those games that made you buy whatever system it was on, i.e. it was a "killer app."  You're saying that that is no longer the case, since there are plenty of traditional gamers who don't care enough for modern Zelda to buy the system.

I think the worst part of the "no new fans" argument is that it ignores the zeniths and nadirs that the Zelda series goes through; if Twilight Princess players are (assumedly) all Ocarina players, where the Hell were they when Wind Waker came out? Am I to assume that there were no new fans who came in for Twilight Princess, and people just came back after a sojourn surrounding Wind Waker? Why not apply that same logic to Ocarina of Time, since it only outsold the original game by about half a million units or so? Surely most of those 3 million sales above Link to the Past must have been players who returned after leaving thee series after finishing the original game.

No, the logic doesn't hold.

I'm trying to figure out exactly how much Twilight Princess needs to have sold to match The Legend of Zelda's success, but I'd need these figues to do it:

How much of actual marketshare Wii has (including handhelds)

How much Wii ownerships overlaps with Gamecube ownership

How much Wii ownership overlaps with DS ownership (just for the sake of Phantom Hourglass postulations)

Individual factors may support his thesis, I don'tdeny that, I was simply listing them out for the sake of listing out factors needed for a full perspective on the market and a full perspective on success.

And that's an oversimplification concerning market fracturing: it assumes that core buyers haven't spent the last fifteen years inundated in different brands entirely apart from the Nintendo one, and bought quickly and hard into those brands in expectation of certain games. Malstrom's acknowledged this. No software provided would be able to draw those gamers away from their system of choice until that system is dead - and he's acknowledged that, too.

EDIT:

And, so that I do not triple post:

1. We must consider different value metrics coming into play here! Back in the old days, there tended to be a much more unified type of gamer, who came form the arcades. Malstrom has acknowledged this before, and it was a talking point in several recent posts by him (I think). There still are not as many arcade-style gamers now as there were then - if Malstrom insists that there are then he is wrong. The Wii crowd are TV-style gamers, and the handheld market is similarly diffrent, which can be gleaned from their software choices.

2. Leading from the fact that there is a fracturing of value metrics, we must also acknowledge that the percentage of players who would appreciat a game like Zelda has necessarily shrunk. Does that support his point? No, it doesn't - I'm talking about The Legend of Zelda, not Zelda as a franchise. The original game could not perform similarly to its past performance in the current market, and drawing direct parallels is foolish.

3. "Mainstream" does not now mean what it meant in 1987. As value metrics have changed, so hass "mainstream" in the context of video games. Mainstream in 1987 was arcade gamers. Mainstream in 2010 are people who don't play games yet - existing gamers have such wide and varying value metrics that "mainstream," when applied to current (or core) gamers, can only refer to the largest minority. That is not what "mainstream" means if we are trying to use it in the original spirit of the word.

4. There is a difference between "decline" and "stagnation". Argue that the Zelda series has declined, and you are wrong - sales prove that, especially sales in comparison to the size of demographics to whom the series appeals. Argue that it has stagnated, and I will nod in glum acknowledgement. Zelda sales have ben stale for the past 20 years. That's not going to change unless the series changes in a way that Malstrom himself can neither predict, quantify, or possibly even like. He thinks Skyward Sword is the one to watch because it may be the most mainstream title since OoT, but he's wrong. Skyward Sword will not appeal to the mainstream at all, because it appeals to arcade values.

5. This logic cannot apply solely to Zelda, and yet that is the only place in which he applies it! He calls New Super Mario Bros. Wii a phenomenon in line with every other game in its series, and yet in order to stand on level with Super Mario World (much less Mario Bros. 3) it would need to sell over FORTY MILLION COPIES. It will not make even half that! In order to compare to Super Mario Bros. 3, it would need to sell nearly as much as Wii Sports (which is owned by, what, a third of the market? Guessing here)! If we accept that the first Zelda was owned by 10% of the market, and Twilight Princess is owned by.... let's say 3.5% of the market (the accuracy of the figure here doesn't matter so longn as I keep the scale the same), and then we look at Super Mario Bros. 3's 30% compared to NSMBWii's 8%.... Christ, they've declined by exactly the same amount!

Who would have thunk!

6. Diversification in tasts necessarily means that any game standing out from the cowd has succeeded in a much bigger way than those games which did so when the market was less diverse! Size hs little or nothing to do with this point, because if you're a much larger market but with much more varied tastes, then a given genre may necessarily decline and for a game to appeal beyond the boundaries of a genre in this varied market requires a deeper and more intrinsic level of appeal!

Can you guess how much DKCR would need to sell to match his expectations of it measuring up against DKC? I'm not sure. The number is absolutely absurd. I think it's in the range of 18 million!

The point here is this: Malstrom pretends there's an absolute metric of quality that will appeal to everyone. He's wrong.

Also he's a hpocrite for not lamenting the death of 2D Mario.

I'm implying that if Zelda doesn't have its magic now, then his hopes for Skyward Sword are misguided.

Appealing to arcade values is not an avenue for success any more. You need more than that.

Edit: I said it will have a hard time selling forty million, thank you very much.