‘Zelda effect’ causes game sales to drop this May (Europe)

GSD, passed GamesIndustry.biz, has shared the latest sales data for the video game market across Europe for May 2024, and it looks like it’s been a quiet month. So quiet, in fact, that the entire top 10 failed to sell as many copies as highly anticipated May 2023. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Across physical and digital data from major European markets (excluding Nintendo which does not share digital figures), game sales were down 17% in May 2024 over the same period last year. That’s still 11.6 million game sales.

EA Sports FC 24 was the best-selling product of the month, followed by Grand Theft Auto V. Regarding new releases, F1 24 is the highest ranked game, ranked third, Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s CutThe PC release saw it come in fourth place, while Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door came in fifth place (even without digital sales).

While exact figures aren’t available, GSD data highlights that The Thousand-Year Door, which is a remake of the 2004 GameCube game, fell 8% on Super Mario role-playing gameopens in two weeks and is 8.5% lower than the most recent Paper Mario game, Origami King.

We’ve listed the full top ten for you below from GSD:

However, console sales were worse. May 2024 saw console sales drop 40%, with 311,000 units sold. Switch saw the biggest drop of the major consoles, again due to the release of Tears of the Kingdom And that special edition of the Switch OLED. It’s a similar story with accessories like controllers, with sales of those accessories down 25%.

Basically, May 2024 was a pretty quiet month on the video game front in terms of big names – even with two Nintendo titles, Thousand-Year Door and The endless ocean shines. The drop, especially when compared to Tears of the Kingdom, one of the best-selling video games of 2023, isn’t too surprising. At least we have a pretty exciting rest of the year for the Switch going forward.