 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. I'm here today to talk about the future of the Zelda series and before I dive into this, I just want to remind you that we are on a road to 150,000 subscribers and look, I'm just a YouTuber chasing his dream here. I turned 37 in less than a week. It's kind of crazy. I'm the sole provider for my family. This is the only thing I do and I'm just really, really happy in my life. So I would appreciate if you would just subscribe to the channel to help me chase my dream, help me inspire the children, inspire other younger content creators out there, or even older content creators than me to not give up on their dreams, because that's what this YouTube thing is. Now that being said, let's talk about the future of Zelda because I'm going to be pretty frank and honest with you guys on this. I love tears of the kingdom. It is my favorite Zelda game of all time. It might not be your favorite game. Maybe you're dumb playing it. Maybe you liked Breath of the Wild more. Maybe you're more of an Ocarina of Time guy or an Elique to the Past or, I don't know, whatever Zelda games your favorite. Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker. Look, we all have our favorite Zelda games out there and our own personal top fives, top threes, or I guess if you've only played two, top two. But the point is that the future of Zelda is, well, it's a bit bleak. Now, when I say it's bleak, I don't mean Zelda's in trouble. Of course it's not. But when we're talking about when the next Zelda game could come, it's going to be a while. Now, if we look at the development cycle of the last two Zelda games, we know they took a while, right? Like five years, six plus years. And the next time a new Zelda game comes out, at least a new mainline Zelda game, it's probably going to end up being a while. Now, there is one caveat to this. One little chink in the armor. Nintendo could give us a top-down Zelda game, maybe made by Grezzo or some other studio. And a top-down Zelda game is, yes, a mainline Zelda game. So that is the wrench in this whole thing that could end up happening sometime in the next couple of years. And then we're really not waiting that long for the next Zelda. But if we're not going to get a top-down Zelda, if we presume that it's possible it might not happen and Nintendo might stick with the remaster and remake route where we get the Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD, maybe we eventually get the Oracle of Seasons and Ages and the Minish Cap. Maybe a link to the past comes back. The point is if they go with the remake and remaster route and then obviously spin-offs, I think like another Hyrule Warriors could happen, even if it's not related to the mainline games. Look, Age of Calamity is the best-selling Warriors game ever. That includes all the Dynasty Warrior games, One Piece Warriors, etc. Yeah, they're clearly going to probably go back to that well eventually. What I do think is that it could be a while. Now, we're going to have a lot of Zelda love. Nintendo is going to keep the spin-offs going, the cadence of Hyrule's of the world, the Age of Calamities. We're going to keep getting the remakes and remasters. And we're going to be talking about these Zelda games regularly for a long time. But the success of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is sort of a double-edged sword in some ways. For some people, it's a double-edged sword because you just don't like the direction of Zelda. You don't like these open-world Zelda games. You don't want this to be the future. You've got a lot of problems with it. You miss the traditional nature of the old games. And for you, that's the double-edged sword. You're really happy that Zelda is popular, reaching these new audiences. But then on the other side, man, you're probably never going to get the Zelda game you want anymore. After all, Aji Aonuma said that this is what the future of Zelda is going to be. It might not be exactly Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but they're not going backwards. They're going to keep going forwards with these new style of games. Okay, that's one thing. That's one thing we can keep in the background and go, okay, cool. But what about for those of you that love these games? Is it a double-edged sword? If you think that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are some of the best games you've ever played, you can't wait for more. This is exactly what you want from the future of Zelda. Well, it's still a double-edged sword in a particular way. As amazing as these games are for these games to exist in the way that they are, it takes a long time to make games. And as more powerful hardware comes out, in general, development time only increases. So if it's taken five to six years each to make these games happen, there's nothing saying it won't be seven, maybe eight years until the next Zelda game. And this is the quote-unquote sad reality of being a Zelda fan right now, is while we are living in bliss playing this new game, we might even have a DLC at some point for it. It's also true that it's 2023. We may not see a new Zelda game until 2030. Let that just, let that sink in for a moment. How long it could be to the next main lines of the game? Now again, the chink in the armors, if they go with the top-down one, and I'm not saying they're not going to release remakes or remasters, but just let that sink in. Development time isn't going to shrink to make the kind of games that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are obviously going to be expansive. We always thought after Breath of the Wild was made, the next one wouldn't take as long, right? It can't take as long. They already have the engine built. And then it turns out, no, it still took even longer. So I think we need to prepare ourselves for what's going to feel like the longest drought between new Zelda game releases in the history of Zelda. Again, for going a possible top-down Zelda game in between. Now maybe that's crazy. Maybe that sounds wild to you, but we have to think logically about this from Nintendo's perspective. They've done the remakes and remasters. They've dropped Link's Awakening, right? They did that as a remake. They did the Skyward Sword HD, and neither one of those games really sold extremely well. They didn't find $4 or $5 million in sales each, and that's not bad. But then you look at Breath of the Wild at $30 million. You look at Tears of the Kingdom, which is likely already at $15 million. And you wonder to yourselves, well, okay, why would Nintendo not want to release more Zelda games more often? And it's because of sales. If you know, you can drop a new Zelda game in 2030 and have it sell 20 to 30 million copies. I mean, that's like releasing four Zelda games in the past. I mean, let's just be honest. Not every game did $8 million, like, say, Twilight Princess. And even then, that would still be three plus Zelda game releases to hit $30 million. So if Nintendo knows they can garner, with these kinds of Zelda games, these sort of massive sales, Zelda's going to slowly become not only a once-per-generation game, there might be future generations that get skipped. I mean, let's think about this. If we presume the next Zelda game comes in 2030, what platform is it on? Is it going to be Switch 2, or are we already moving on from Switch 2 to whatever's next after that? Like, that sounds impossible, but if it happens, we have to consider now that Zelda is in this precarious position where we may, one, never see it launch a system again based on current development cycles. It's always going to drop towards the end of a console generation at this point. And number two, that Zelda games are just going to take even longer. I look at myself, right? And this is something that comes up every time I get close to my birthday. And I start to think, man, what if it does take seven years to get the next Zelda game? I could be, oh geez, 40, 40 years old. I mean, I'm in my mid to late 30s here, turning 37 here in a week. And I, look, 40, 44. The next Zelda game after that might not drop to I'm 51, then 58, then God willing, I'm still alive at 65. There's only like a handful more potential new Zelda games in my lifetime. And that is crazy. And that's sort of what I mean by the double-edged sword is I've been playing Zelda games my entire life, 36 years basically. And in that time, there's almost a Zelda game for every other year of my life, which is insane. That's how many Zelda games we've had there. There've been so many Zelda games. But now that cadence of release is going to be much less. And I have to look internally and decide for myself if I actually like that. If I like that there's less Zelda releases, but each one is an event. Well, I could argue each Zelda game release in the past was an event. People didn't look at Spirit Tracks as an event. I love Spirit Tracks. So this is, well, while every other franchise should in theory be getting games more often because Nintendo's not releasing everything on a single system, Zelda is actually getting games less often, new games less often. So to me, I'm having a hard time accepting this reality, but it is one that we're going to have to. Now, one thing I'm trying to do to counteract this reality is not rush through Zelda games. I know a lot of you guys have 160, 300, 400, 500 hours in Tears of the Kingdom. A lot of you guys have already beat the story. A lot of you guys have done a lot of stuff. I'm taking my time. I decided when I realized this reality could be a thing that I am going to take as long as possible to beat Tears of the Kingdom. If I'm still playing Tears of the Kingdom and then, you know, at some point in 2024 and I still haven't beat the story, I am doing something right in my mind. Why? Because I want to take my time. I don't want to rush through. I want to know there's still something new to experience in this world of Tears of the Kingdom because it's going to be so long until that next Zelda game. So I hope I'm wrong on this. Maybe Nintendo doubles down and they don't take as long and we get a new Zelda game in three years. I mean, three years is asking a lot. But I'm just saying that maybe I'm wrong. And that could be. I don't work at Nintendo. But I'm just watching the patterns. I know as more powerful hardware comes out, everyone else is taking longer to make games. So why wouldn't Nintendo take longer? And we see evidence with Nintendo's cadence of release is that while we're getting a lot of games more often, we're not necessarily getting repeats and franchises more often. You know, it was only in two Fire Emblem games and we got like three or four on 3DS. So I'm just pointing out that we need to prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally that the next Zelda game is probably massive. It's probably going to be an event and it's going to be a while. Also because it's going to be a while, what happens if Nintendo releases a Zelda game that misses? That could be 14 to 20 years between successful Zelda games. That's another thing I don't want to think about. Anyways guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I am Nathaniel Roblejans from Nintendo Prime. You let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. And I'll catch you in the next video.