Power Gamers and The Tears of the Kingdom
Nintendo’s highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a massive success. It has already surpassed 10 million worldwide copies sold in just 3 days and is the fastest selling Zelda game of all time. The game has also lived up to the hype and as of this writing, is currently holding a 95 on Metacritic, including numerous perfect scores. This has been outstanding news for Nintendo given it is the first Nintendo game to reflect a price tag of $70 relative to the previous $60.
Given LG TV’s strong technology capabilities for gamers and LG Ad Solutions’ unique position to understand video game behavior through our Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, we wanted to explore gaming trends for the first week of the game’s release as players guided Link on a new adventure. Although the game was released on Friday, May 12, 2023, we will be looking at the Saturday 13 – Friday 19th time period in the US to accommodate download times or gamers who purchased a physical copy of the game.
In the first seven days of the game’s release, we saw gamers sink a collective 66,464 days or 1.595 million hours into Tears of the Kingdom. Additionally, we saw that on average, players tended to have longer cumulative play time on the weekend relative to weekdays.
But what about the power gamer? The person who has been looking forward to this since first completing the previous Breath of the Wild in 2017? The gamer who planned to take time off from work so nothing would interrupt their gaming session? Well, we took a look at gamers who were in the top 5% of daily playtime and unsurprisingly, they played a lot of Tears of the Kingdom.
On average, the Power Gamer (top 5%) played 3.5X more than Normal Gamers. We even saw a few sessions where gamers played for more than 16 hours in a single day! That being said, the below graph shows that even for Power Gamers, it is easier to put more game time in on the weekends relative to the weekdays when there is no work competing for your gaming time.
In addition to supporting what we already knew in that Tears of the Kingdom is extremely popular, this gaming data has some interesting implications for advertisers. For example, if you are targeting a Power Gamer, the TV home screen might be your only opportunity for the day to reach your audience before she kicks off a marathon gaming session.
Interested in learning more about how Automatic Content Recognition can help you understand gamers and better target your audience? Connect with us at sales@lgads.tv to learn how ACR can enhance your campaign!
Happy Gaming!
