The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold 18 million copies. At one early point in time, Nintendo had sold more copies of Breath of the Wild than it sold the Switch consoles you need to play it on. Saying that Breath of the Wild is popular is an understatement. And video games have very strange copyright rules: You can't copy the code, or the characters, but you *can* copy look and gameplay. So it isn't surprising that in a week we will get Genshin Impact, the game most famous for being such a blatant copy of Breath of the Wild that people were breaking their PS4 consoles in protest. While Breath of the Wild can only be played on the Switch, Genshin Impact runs on Switch, PS4, PC, iOS, and Android devices. So even if it is a clone, it makes the gameplay available to a lot of people who don't own a Switch and can't play the original. Sounds like a plan to me!

I will definitively have a look at this game. It might be huge, there are already nearly 4 million people pre-registered before the game even comes out on September 28. I love Breath of the Wild, and don't mind a clone, if it is well done (we will see whether it is). And I am curious how it could possibly play on my iPad, without a gamepad, and how cross-platform play will work.

Having said that, I can see the downside of the combination of cross-platform play and a highly anticipated release: I've been at too many MMORPG launches that crashed the servers to not consider that possibility. If 4 million people try to login at the same time, the effect is predictable.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link