Japanese soft/hardware sales for May 2023: Zelda: TotK takes #1, triples BotW's debut

Zelda lifts Switch across the board

14 June 2023
by rawmeatcowboy 1
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The game industry numbers for Japan in May 2023 have come in, and we’ve got insight into how things went for Nintendo in terms of hardware and software. Let’s start things off with a look at the top 10 games of the month.

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Without Hogwarts Legacy landing on the charts, Nintendo would have had a clean sweep of May 2023. It’s no surprise to see Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sitting at #1, which moved an impressive 1.5 million units in Japan alone. Remember, the game launched on May 12th, 2023, so it didn’t even have a full month’s worth of time to move those units!

It’s also worth pointing out that Tears of the Kingdom trounced the debut sales of Breath of the Wild in Japan. According to Famitsu data, Breath of the Wild sold 346,000 copies by its third weekend back in March 2017.

On the hardware side of things, Switch came in once again as the #1 hardware. The Switch OLED represented 52.8% of new hardware sales in May, compared to 47% in April. Obviously, a considerable amount of those Switch OLED units sold were the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom edition. All in all, Switch saw 345k units sold, compared to the PS5’s 145k for the month.

[Games Industry]

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Comments (1)

hawk

11M ago

I remember hearing that Zelda was a franchise that sold much better in the west than it did in Japan. I'd hope that's a thing of the past. There's not reason it shouldn't do well in Japan.
 
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