Why Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the biggest system seller in history

Enlarge / Breath of the Wild is like an angelic light shining on the totem of the Switch's hardware launch.

The term "system seller" gets thrown around a lot in video games to describe a game that's good enough to justify buying a new console practically on its own. We may have to figure out a new term to apply to a system seller as hot as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though. In the US, it seems the Switch version of the game is somehow selling better than the system it's played on.

Those numbers come from the NPD group and Nintendo, which report that while the Switch sold 906,000 units in the US in March, the Switch version of Breath of the Wild sold "more than 925,000 units." That's the first instance we can recall where a piece of software has a reported attach rate that's actually higher than 100 percent.

Breath of the Wild's reported sales success doesn't come completely out of the blue. GameStop said last month that the game had an "almost one-to-one attach result" with the Switch hardware, and the title sold to about 91 percent of initial Switch owners in France. Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aime also called Breath of the Wild the best standalone launch title in Nintendo history just after the system's US launch.

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