Newzoo Ranks a Silly Island Game Above Resident Evil and Forza

Nintendo's life sim about cartoon avatars of your friends and family has out-earned several of the year's biggest blockbusters in six Western markets, according to Newzoo, and Nintendo is already using it to sell a Zelda remake. ^[1][3]

Newzoo, a market tracker, ranked Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream third among new 2026 releases for revenue from January through September in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as Polygon reported on October 31. ^[1] It sat ahead of Resident Evil Requiem, Pokémon Pokopia, Crimson Desert and Forza Horizon 6. ^[1]

My reading is that this is a useful correction to the idea that the industry only moves forward by getting bigger. Players will gladly spend on a world-saving quest. They will also pay, in very large numbers, for a game with no quest at all.

What the game actually is

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream came out on Nintendo Switch on April 16, 2026, and Nintendo lists it as compatible with Switch 2. ^[2] Nintendo describes it as an island life sim. You build Mii characters, Nintendo's customisable cartoon avatars, based on yourself, family, friends or invented people. Then you watch and nudge their relationships and daily lives. ^[2]

There is no dragon, no map to clear and no ending to chase. The entertainment is the social weather: who falls out with whom, who falls for whom, what absurd situation your Mii of a relative ends up in. Nintendo's own description leans on silliness, drama and relationships, not on conquest. ^[2]

A genre built on that premise sounds modest. The numbers are not.

The numbers, kept apart

Two figures are in play and they measure different things. Newzoo's is a revenue ranking across six Western markets for nine months. ^[1] Nintendo's is a unit count: Polygon reports the company said the game had sold more than eight million copies worldwide by the end of June. ^[1]

The second figure is the one that makes you sit up. The game launched on April 16, so that is roughly 75 days, or about eleven weeks. More than eight million copies in that time averages out above 100,000 a day, every day, for the whole stretch.

The ranking also has a wrinkle. Polygon reports the game was first in Newzoo's table a month earlier and slipped to third only when the September releases of the FC and NBA sports series arrived. ^[1] Annual sports games are built to dominate a calendar. A silly island life sim was ahead of them until they showed up.

Newzoo's underlying data and methods are not public in what Polygon reports, so the ranking should be read as Newzoo's estimate. It covers six markets and says nothing about Japan or the rest of the world. Even so, it is hard to read it as anything but a hit.

Why the usual story fails

The usual story of games in the 2020s is one of escalation. Bigger maps, longer campaigns, higher budgets, more spectacle. The titles Tomodachi Life beat in the Newzoo table are, by reputation, big-ticket products: a flagship Resident Evil sequel, a Forza racing game, a large open-world fantasy. ^[1]

I would not claim the sales prove why people bought it. No source isolates the causes, and a game can sell for many reasons at once: the size of the existing Switch audience, clips that spread online, a long-loved series name. All of that is plausible. None of it has been measured.

But one thing can be said without over-reading. Whatever the mix of reasons, the game that Nintendo shipped has no ambition to be epic, and it sold anyway. That is a data point against the assumption that every successful game has to promise a bigger world. Some of the market wants a small one, populated with people it knows.

There is also a plain human logic to it. A game built from your own friends and family is a game whose content cannot be copied by a rival studio. It is made at the player's table, out of the player's own people. No amount of production budget buys that.

One ad, two eras

The more interesting move is what Nintendo does next. Polygon describes a new Nintendo UK advertisement, "Back to Me", in which a student plays Ocarina of Time on a train. He then makes a Mii of his father with his sister in Tomodachi Life and plays the life sim with her over GameChat. ^[1] Polygon says the ad uses Tomodachi Life's popularity to make a simple point: Switch games can also be played on Switch 2. ^[1]

That is a compact piece of catalogue strategy. A freshly popular game becomes the doorway, and an older one stands behind it. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is itself being remade for Switch 2, with overhauled visuals, orchestral music, voice acting, expanded cutscenes and updated controls, and Nintendo lists its release as November 5, 2026. ^[3]

So the campaign sets a comic hit from this spring beside a remake of an old adventure, and implies that they belong to one shelf. It is the logic of a platform, not of a single release cycle. A player who arrived for the silly game is shown that the serious classic is a few taps away, on the same console family, with the same friends in the other seat.

The ad's small story is worth noticing too. A brother and sister, a Mii of their father, a game played together at a distance. Whatever else it is, the scene sells the game as something shared, not as a test of skill.

The objection: does it actually work?

Here I want to be strict. The strongest objection to the neat version of this story is that nobody has shown the pairing moves Zelda numbers at all.

Polygon reports a shared advertisement and a revenue ranking for Tomodachi Life. It does not report any measured change in awareness, preorders or sales for Ocarina of Time. ^[1] Nintendo's product page for the remake gives a date and a feature list and no sales data. ^[3] The claim that a new hit pulls a classic back into the conversation is, for now, a reasonable description of what Nintendo intends, not a finding.

That objection holds. It removes the claim of proof. It does not remove the argument, which rests on two things that are documented: the life sim's success, and the company's choice to put it in the same frame as Zelda. Nintendo is spending advertising money on the belief that its audience moves between old and new, and between the comic and the heroic. Whether the belief is right is what the next few weeks will start to answer.

There is a second, quieter point. If the pairing does work, it will not be because Tomodachi Life is a good advert for Zelda. It will be because the same people want both. A player who spends an evening watching a Mii of their uncle argue with a Mii of their friend is not a different species from one who wants to explore Hyrule. They are the same player on a different night.

What to watch

The test arrives on November 5, when Ocarina of Time reaches Switch 2. ^[3] If Nintendo publishes launch sales or player figures, they will show how large the Zelda audience is. If it also credits the life sim for a share of it, that will be the first real evidence for the pull-through. If it says nothing, the ad stays what it is today, a confident piece of marketing.

Tomodachi Life's own numbers will also keep moving. The eight-million figure stops at the end of June, and the Newzoo ranking covers only to September. ^[1] A holiday quarter lies ahead.

Either way, the lesson of the spring is already on the table. The year's quietest premise has been among its loudest earners.