Last Friday, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the latest entry in the ever-popular monster catching franchise, had sold 5.8 million copies in its debut week.
Now, Circana's Senior Director & Video Game Industry Thought Leader, Mat Piscatella, revealed that the game's retail launch was particularly big in the United States, where it registered the best performance of the last two and a half years.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A had a massive US launch at retail. Launch week physical unit and dollar sales of Pokémon Legends: Z-A were the biggest for a new physical video game launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom back in May of 2023.
It's not at all surprising that Nintendo games excel at retail sales performance. PlayStation and Xbox users have long since switched to digital games, but the Nintendo audience is different and still quite linked to physical units.
In Europe, though, the retail launch was a bit smaller. According to The Game Business, which had access to GSD data, Pokémon Legends: Z-A managed to knock EA's Battlefield 6 from the top position but also registered a 28% sales drop compared to the debut week of Pokémon Legends: Arceus in 2022. Indeed, as noted back when the official sales announcement was shared last week, Arceus had sold 6.5 million units in the same timeframe.
Still, the game appears to have received the acclaim of fans and critics alike. In Wccftech's review, Nathan Birch wrote:
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the most cohesive, thoughtfully constructed Pokémon RPG of the HD era. Some may miss the more expansive world of something like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but this game's top-notch new combat mechanics, solid gameplay loop, and refreshing level of polish makes it fairly easy to overlook its compact map. Pokémon Legends: Z-A feels like a great new foundation to build on and I'm excited to see how the series evolves next.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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