Zelda was in “dire straits” before Breath of the Wild with fan base “dwindling”
Posted on <a href="https://comicvibe.com/fantastic-five-best-comics-of-the-week-of-november-11-2026/” title=”Fantastic Five: Best comics of the week of November 11, 2026″>November 13, 2026 by Brian(@NE_Brian)
in General Nintendo, News
According to former Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, The Legend of Zelda was “in dire straits” before the launch of Breath of the Wild with a “dwindling” fan base and sales on the decline.
Ellis and Yang shared that information in a podcast this week. Ellis himself attended focus groups and saw that “the fan base is dwindling” and the series wasn’t attracting new players.
The two shared the following about how we stopped receiving traditional 3D Zelda titles and how Nintendo needed to shake things up with Breath of the Wild:
Kit: There has been some revisionist history out there lately about how ‘Oh, the Zelda team ripped these away from us at the peak of the popularity! Why did they do that?’
Krysta: The series was in like dire straits. They were selling like nothing.
Kit: Yeah, I remember I was going to the focus groups. It was a really dark moment of like, the fan base is dwindling, this is not bringing in new players. We had so much data of like every game, it was fewer, the interest from the audience was getting smaller and smaller. They had to do something dramatic like that.
What Kit and Krysta are saying here isn’t wrong based on sales data. The series seemed to peak with Twilight Princess, which sold nearly nine million copies. In terms of brand-new titles, the series never came close to that same amount. As one example, Skyward Sword sold under four million copies for its original Wii release.
It’s really amazing then just how much Breath of the Wild broke things open. Since launch, the game has sold almost 35 million copies.
Nintendo recently announced initial sales numbers for Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Switch 2, revealing that it sold over five million copies in just four days. By the end of 2026, it could outsell the original N64 game, which stands at 7.60 million copies. Ocarina of Time 3D sold 6.44 million units.
More: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, top
