 Well, folks, we have four big stories to bring you today, some actual Nintendo goodness news, and you know what? I don't want to waste any more of your time. I want to actually just dive right into that news. So let's get to our first story. And this deals with Ubisoft because did you know that Ubisoft apparently wants to make a spin-off Zelda game? In fact, maybe a spin-off off of one of my favorite Zelda games in the adventure of Link. So for those who don't know, Ubisoft recently released a game called Prince of Persia, and it's doing extremely well on all platforms, reviewing super well, selling well, everything you could want from a game right now, right, critically received, whatever. People aren't even saying the game might even be better than Nintendo's own Game of the Year contender from the past in Metroid Dread. That's because, yes, this is a Metroidvania style game. Well, in wake of that game coming out, they decided to do an AMA over on Reddit. And they came up with an interesting question from one of the users and got an interesting response about a game that Ubisoft wants to make. Let's go take a look at this. So as you see here by Ice Crabby, he asked a couple of questions. We're going to focus on his second one where he says, if you can make a game for an IP that you don't slash haven't had access to, for example, Mario or Final Fantasy, what IP would you pick and what kind of game would you make? Ubisoft senior developer, Remy Bhutan responded and he says right at the end down here, an I personally would love to work with the Zelda IP, maybe a strange spin-off based on Adventure of Link. And then of course he throws out their Castlevania. Now this is obviously really awesome. Ubisoft has worked with Nintendo already. They have a crossover IP and Mario plus Rabbids. So it's not like insane to think this would happen. They also put Star Fox in Starlink, if you remember. So that's really cool as well. So there's already a history of Ubisoft working with Nintendo doing crossover IPs, not directly spin-offs. I mean, you could say Mario plus Rabbids is a spin-off but more of a crossover. It would be interesting if they would allow the Prince of Persia team to possibly make a Zelda spin-off game and it's interesting that they want to sort of spin it off the Adventure of Link which is one of the more unique experiences in the Zelda world. There's essentially not another Zelda game like the Adventure of Link. It stands alone as a very difficult, much more combat focused. It's an RPG for lack of a better word and I do wonder what Ubisoft would do with that. This particular team would do with that. Lot of people are saying this Prince of Persia game is one of the best things to come out of Ubisoft in a long time. So you know what? If they want to partner up with Nintendo, that to me would be utterly fantastic. Next we have to talk about the Ace Attorney franchise. Now, why do we need to talk about Ace Attorney? Well, well because there's a brand new remastered Ace Attorney trilogy dropping called the Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Trilogy dropping on Thursday. Now we can get into reviews and all the stuff about that. That's not really what interests me today. What we actually want to talk about is what about brand new Ace Attorney games? So again, this is a remaster or a remake of sorts. What about brand new games? Well, thankfully we don't need to wonder because, well Capcom has spoken on it and you're going to see that here over at my Nintendo news where it says Capcom says that Ace Attorney series will not be stopping and when you scroll down here you'll see that it says Capcom has confirmed to the Japanese news site for Gamer that the Ace Attorney series is running at full steam and while the established company may have been with other projects the Ace Attorney series will not be stopping anytime soon. Here's what Kenichi Hashimoto who was the producer behind the Apollo Justice Re-release had to say to the publication at this time there is nothing to talk about. So there's not being like oh, we're making a brand new game right now. But we have gained a lot of knowledge about the RE engine which is the current primary engine that Capcom uses. I can say that the Ace Attorney series will not be stopping. So in that sense, I think you can look forward to what is coming. In other words, while there isn't currently an Ace Attorney game in development he's saying that they are not ending the series and there is some dedication from inside Capcom to keep the franchise going. Right now it's just taking the team that they're currently using on this Ace Attorney Apollo stuff and making them learn the new engines and all that stuff. So maybe that could eventually lead to a brand new game. It's just nice to see that there is some dedication from inside Capcom because sometimes what happens is you get a lot of these remasters and re-releases and you never get new games. So I'm glad to hear that, hey, the Ace Attorney franchise which has been around for quite some time at this point on Nintendo systems is coming back and going to come back in a big way with a brand new game someday. Next up we gotta get into some sales figures, the end of year sales figures. Look, we're in January, we've already gotten things like the Serkano report for, you know, former leading NPD for all of last year which looks really good for Nintendo. Obviously with PlayStation in the lead here in the US we've already got end of year numbers in Japan. So how about some end of year sales data for Nintendo Switch from Nintendo of France's president? That's right, we're gonna go however to friend of the channel Paul Gale Network who had a breakdown of this over on his ex-account and here's what he had to say, Nintendo, France's president, Philippe Le Vue and I probably butchered that so I apologize, had the following to share. The Super Mario Bros. movie was number one in the French box office in 2023 with 7.3 million admissions. That's awesome. The legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom launched with more than 500,000 physical sales and then with digital the Zelda game is over one million. Super Mario Bros. Wonder had the best start for a Super Mario game in France's history. Mario games in total, combining them all together sold over 2.7 million units last year. 855,000 Nintendo Switch units were sold in 2023 which is down from 987,000 that were sold in 2022. The 8 million mark for Nintendo Switch hardware in France will be met by the end of this month. So essentially we could just say that Nintendo Switch has sold 8 million units in France alone, which is awesome. 55% of retail games sold last year were on Switch. So even with the strong PlayStation presence, Switches were a majority of retail games that were being sold. The legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom was the best selling game of the year with Super Mario Bros. Wonder being the second by SKU and third on all formats. Presuming Hogwarts legacy might have been number two overall. Five of the top 10 best selling games were also on Nintendo Switch. Now retail only in France for 2023 shows the legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom at 968,000. Super Mario Bros. Wonder at 747,500. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at number three at 383,500. Minecraft at 230,900. EA Sports FC 24 at 167,500. Nintendo Switch Sports at 154,600. Mario Party Superstars at 153,800. Hogwarts Legacy at number eight at 153,300. Then Animal Crossing New Horizons at number nine with 153,100. Man, look at all those really close sales. And rounding out that top 10 is new Super Mario Bros. New Deluxe at 132,500. And then Paul Gale goes on to say it was quite a successful year. 8 million Nintendo Switch sales in France means that one in every 8.5 people in France have the platform. There's roughly 68 million people in the country. That's a whopping 11.8% impressive. Yeah folks, sales for the Nintendo Switch have been incredible. The globe over and just getting these nice details out of France, which we don't always get every year is just really nice to see. And hey, credit to Nintendo of France's specific president for coming out and dropping these metrics. Probably just because they are actually impressive. Moving on to our final story, we need to talk about Persona 3 Reload. Look, we've gotten various Persona games, Persona 5, et cetera, on Nintendo Switch. Like we've gotten a lot of different variants of Persona on Switch that have done fairly well. But a new game that's on this way is the sort of remake remaster of Persona 3 and Persona 3 Reload. And while we know it is not presently coming to Nintendo Switch and is going to all the other platforms, that doesn't mean they're not considering bringing the game to Nintendo Switch. There was an interview conducted by Atomics, which is a Spanish website with one of the main people behind Persona 3 Reload. And we're gonna go ahead and use an English translation of their article to let you know it could still come to Nintendo Switch. So here we are in this article, it says it's for Persona 3 Reload coming to Switch, Atlas Response, and it notes here that there was an interview being conducted and they couldn't help but ask the question about what had happened to the version for Nintendo Switch, especially taken into account the good results the company had with the hybrid platform. So here's what they asked. The director of Persona 3 Reload, Takuya Yamaguchi, and I probably butcher that again, and its producer, Rayoto Nitsuma, what was somewhat ambiguous, et cetera, et cetera, here is actually the response about it. Since we began conceptualizing everything that would come to Persona 3 Reload, we decided there would be no version for the Nintendo Switch, sad day. Of course, the idea is there, but it's a matter of discussing it with the team and seeing what they think about it and we'll see what happens. In other words, no, there's not any like present plans to bring it to Switch, but they are thinking about it. They're contemplating it and they just haven't really talked about it with the development team to really see if one, they're highly motivated to do it. Two, they think it's even possible. And three, it's just a worthwhile investment to even do it in the first place. And now again, Persona has seen various levels of success on Nintendo platforms. So to me, if it's possible to get it on Switch, I'd like to see it come over. We also have to remember we are at this stage and I haven't brought it up this entire video till now, so give me a break here. We are at this stage where there is expected new hardware from Nintendo and with that being the case, the team might just go, actually, could we just wait for the new hardware and maybe do it there? We always have to consider that when we're talking about third party ports that aren't announced for Switch that maybe they're not announced for Switch because they're already doing it for something else and it won't surprise me if Atlas had a dev kit for this new platform too and they just can't talk about it. So I don't know, I'm just throwing that out there as a possibility. I obviously would love to see Persona 3 reload on Nintendo Switch if it's technologically feasible. We'll just have to wait and see what happens and if a Switch version ever comes. I wanna thank you all for tuning in. That was today's Prime News or I really should say the first Prime News in like 10 days. Hope you guys enjoyed it and learned a lot. No rumors here, lots of news. Hope it was fun for you as much as it was fun for me.