Nintendo didn’t just reveal The Champions’ Ballad at The Game Awards. They didn’t just announce that it was available for download tonight. They also completely swept The Game Awards 2017, with Breath of the Wild winning awards for Best Action-Adventure Game, Best Game Direction, and, most importantly, it won Game of The Year. Over its own fellow Nintendo Switch game Super Mario Odyssey, which did have more hype considering it came out October 27 and Breath of the Wild came out in March. That’s almost eight months apart.
Breath of the Wild still managed to triumph with its superb design and re-invention of the Zelda series. Even more interesting is Mario is a lot more popular in North America than Zelda, and sales numbers prove that. Breath of the Wild did get better reviews, but Mario is outpacing the game in sales. It sells 463 copies a minute.
Zelda was clearly the spotlight of this year’s Game Awards. They didn’t when every award they were nominated for, but the game won every category that mattered. Best Action-Adventure Game, Best Direction, Game of the Year; these are elite categories. Nintendo had to have planned to release The Champions’ Ballad because they already knew they were going to dominate. It was the perfect way to please fans. Now, on top of an already incredible game, we have some story-based DLC that will improve it to be even better.
Nintendo’s move was genius, and Breath of the Wild deserves all the praise it gets.