"Equal Importance": Nintendo Says Remakes Count as Much as New Games

Nintendo's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sold more than 5.2 million copies worldwide in its first four days, the best opening the company has had with any game it published for the Switch 2, Nintendo said on November 11. ^[2]

The figure includes physical and digital copies, and 810,000 of them were sold in Japan, roughly one in six. ^[2] The game launched on November 5. It is a full rebuild of the Nintendo 64 original from 1998, with reimagined visuals and enhanced playability, and Nintendo says it preserves the original experience. ^[2]

What the record does and does not say

The record is narrow, and Nintendo drew it that way. It compares first-four-day sales among Nintendo-published Switch 2 games. ^[2] It does not say Ocarina of Time has outsold everything on the console.

It has not. By September 30, Mario Kart World had sold 16.48 million units, according to Nintendo's lifetime sales chart. ^[4] The remake would need more than three times its four-day haul to catch it.

The same chart is useful for scale. Donkey Kong Bananza stood at 5.05 million by that date, so the remake passed in four days what that game had gathered up to the end of September. ^[4] Star Fox, the other remake of the year, stood at 1.17 million, and Ocarina of Time has sold more than four times that. ^[4]

So the numbers show a pattern in which one remake is a hit of the first rank and another found a modest audience. A famous name is not a guarantee, and it is a very large head start.

Why a remake of this game

Ocarina of Time is among the most revered games Nintendo has made, and it is easy to see why a rebuilt version would sell. Eurogamer's reviewer gave it five stars and called it "an astonishing remake." ^[1] That is one critic's verdict and says nothing about why 5.2 million people bought it. But it points the same way as the sales.

Nintendo expected the fervour. Nate Bihldorff, a senior vice president at Nintendo, told Polygon around launch that the company anticipated strong excitement from fans. ^[3] He also pointed to a second audience, people who have never played the original, for whom the remake is simply a new game. ^[3]

That second group matters to how the record should be read. A 1998 game is older than many of the people now able to buy it, and Nintendo has not said how many of the 5.2 million were new to Ocarina of Time. A remake can be a reunion, and it can also be a first meeting.

The case for worry

The Daily Inference reported on November 6 that Nintendo says remakes and new games carry equal weight in its lineup, and that the idea deserves scrutiny. Bihldorff put it to Polygon as new games and remakes having "equal importance." ^[3]

He described a cycle of releases built on confidence in Nintendo's developers and its range of franchises. ^[3] Polygon counted Ocarina of Time as the second major Nintendo remake of 2026, after Star Fox in June, and noted that the lineup also holds newer releases such as Kirby Air Riders and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. ^[3]

That is the honest ground for concern. A company can say two things matter equally while its biggest launch numbers go to only one of them. When a remake opens this large, the commercial logic for the next one writes itself. Whether Nintendo follows that logic is a decision it has not yet made in public.

What the record does not show is that the Switch 2 is running on nostalgia. The console's best-selling game on Nintendo's own chart is Mario Kart World, and a newer game, Donkey Kong Bananza, had already passed five million. ^[4] A platform carried by the past would look different. My view is that the danger lies in the margin. If each remake sells four times what a middling new release does, the temptation to fund the safe thing grows quietly, and it will not show in any one quarter's numbers.

What to watch

Several things would settle more than a four-day figure can. Nintendo has not said what share of the 5.2 million was physical, what share was digital, or how many copies were bundled with hardware. Nor has it said whether the remake lifted sales of the console or of other games. The company's next published sales chart will show whether Ocarina of Time keeps selling after the launch rush, and how it sits beside Mario Kart World.

The more telling evidence will be the release slate. If original games keep arriving with the same budget and prominence as the revivals, Nintendo's "equal importance" will have been borne out. If the next big announcements are all names from the past, the 5.2 million will look less like a victory lap and more like a precedent.