‘The Zelda Effect’ Causes Game Sales To Drop This May (Europe)

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

Across physical and digital data from the major European markets (excluding Nintendo which doesn’t share digital figures), Game sales dropped 17% in May 2024, compared to the same period last year. That’s still 11.6 million game sales.

EA Sports FC 24 was the biggest seller of the month, followed by Grand Theft Auto V. In terms of new releases, F1 24 is the highest-placing game, coming in third, Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut‘s PC release saw it come in fourth, while Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door landed in fifth (even without digital sales).

While exact figures are unavailable, GSD data does highlight that Thousand-Year Door, which is a remake of a 2004 GameCube game, is down 8% on Super Mario RPG’s opening two weeks, and 8.5% lower than the last Paper Mario game, The Origami King.

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

Console sales, however, have seen it worse. May 2024 saw a drop of 40% for game consoles, with 311,000 units selling. The Switch saw the biggest drop of the major consoles, once again because of the release of Tears of the Kingdom and that special edition Switch OLED. It’s a similar story for accessories such as controllers, too, with sales on those dropping 25%.

Essentially, May 2024 was a pretty quiet month on the video game front in terms of big names — even with two Nintendo titles in Thousand-Year Door and Endless Ocean Luminous. The drop, especially when compared to Tears of the Kingdom, one of 2023’s best-selling video games, shouldn’t be too surprising. At least we have a pretty fleshed-out rest of the year for the Switch going forward.