Best-Selling Zelda Games: Sales by Game

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best-selling game in the series at 34.06 million copies on Nintendo Switch. That figure is Nintendo's own, printed in its Top Selling Title Sales Units table as of 30 June 2026, and it is the single most reliable number on this page.

Tears of the Kingdom follows at 22.71 million, from the same table and the same date. No other Zelda release is above 10 million. Twilight Princess is third on the list at 8.93 million, and that figure is a community one, combining 7.50 million on Wii with 1.43 million on GameCube.

The gap between the top two and everything else is the clearest thing the chart shows. Breath of the Wild alone outsells the bottom 13 releases on this list combined, which add up to 33.91 million. Both of those sums are ours, taken across figures that do not share a basis or a date, so treat them as scale rather than precision.

Nintendo does publish per-title sales, but only as a top ten for each platform. The Switch table lists ten titles and two of them are Zelda games. The Wii U table lists ten and one is Zelda: The Wind Waker HD at 2.37 million, as of 31 March 2026. The 3DS table lists ten and none is a Zelda game at all.

That is the whole of Nintendo's current per-title disclosure for this series: three figures. Link's Awakening on Switch, Skyward Sword HD, Ocarina of Time 3D and A Link Between Worlds all sold enough to sit high on this ranking and none of them cracks its platform's top ten, so Nintendo has never given them a number.

Older platforms are worse served. Nintendo stopped maintaining tables for the Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy, DS and Wii, so the figures for Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, Majora's Mask and the rest cannot be checked against anything Nintendo publishes today. This is the opposite problem to a series like Monster Hunter, where Capcom keeps one page listing every title past a million and updates it quarterly.

Of the three figures we could verify, one matched and two did not. The Wind Waker HD is listed at 2.37 million and Nintendo says 2.37 million, exactly. Breath of the Wild is listed at 32.81 million on Switch and Nintendo says 34.06 million. Tears of the Kingdom is listed at 21.73 million and Nintendo says 22.71 million.

Both misses are in the same direction: the community figures are roughly a million copies behind, which is what happens when a number is copied once and not revisited. We have used Nintendo's current figures for those two rows and left the rest as reported. That is also a warning about the other 23, which have no check available at all.

One release is missing outright. Echoes of Wisdom shipped in September 2024 and does not appear on the list, so it does not appear in this ranking either. It is not a small omission: a mainline Zelda from the Switch era would almost certainly place inside the top ten here.

Laid out by release year, the series divides cleanly. The four Switch releases on this list total 67.55 million copies, 44.0% of the 153.38 million the whole list adds up to, from a catalogue that opens in February 1986. Both percentages are ours.

Before 2017, no Zelda release is reported above 8.93 million. After it, two are. Part of that is the Switch's own install base, and part is that a modern release stays on sale for years while older ones were tied to hardware that stopped shipping. The chart does not separate those two causes and neither should the reader.

The handheld line is the quiet one. Phantom Hourglass at 4.76 million, Ocarina of Time 3D at 6.44 million and A Link Between Worlds at 4.26 million each outsold Majora's Mask on the Nintendo 64, which the list puts at 3.36 million. None of those four figures is confirmed by anyone.

Only Nintendo can. The series needs what Capcom gives Monster Hunter: one maintained page listing every title past a threshold, restated as the numbers move. Nintendo's top-ten-per-platform format cannot produce that, because a franchise competing with Mario Kart and Pokemon for ten slots will always lose most of its catalogue.

Short of that, two things would help this page. Nintendo's quarterly results could move Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom again, which we would pick up. And an Echoes of Wisdom disclosure, if it ever reaches a platform top ten, would add the one obviously missing row.