Friends, when discussing Twilight Princess sales, you have heard it parrotted that the sales of TP were propelled by the discovery of the Twilight Hack.

Well ladies and gents, I am here to inform you that that is false.

Most of you know that the sales of Twilight Princess amount to 8.17M as per vgchartz' figures.

For certain, 1.6M of TP GC sales were not generated by the TP hack, which is exlusive to the Wii.

But that's not the main argument. In recent observation of the sales trends, I am pleased to inform you that likely more than 90% of Wii sales are not due to the TP hack (I can concede a negligeable 10% of TP Wii sales as an overhead value to the curves).

A quick glance at the curves offered by the tools on VGChartz, it becomes apparent that TP sold the majority of its copies during the holiday season and the lingering weeks that follow. The premice of my proof against the TP hack sales fallacy is that hackers don't necessarily buy hacker tools during the christmas season, they have no reason to. The christmas season is generally a time of sales for families and their children, who are generally not part of the hacker scene. Without further ado, the graphs:

You might notice there are a few minor bumps in the body of the 2007 year. Those are due to the fact that the Wii was supply constrained for the majority of 2007 and also followed a similar curve, so it's no surprise that a hit Wii game like Twilight Princess follow that curve for its growing consumerbase in its entirety (not just hackers).

As you can see from the cummulative sales, TP Wii follows a similar curve to any Nintendo evergreen title, with periodic sales jumps during holiday seasons. For an example of another game following this pattern, see Mario Kart Wii.

The explosions are more pronounced and the initial explosion is relatively not as big as for TP, but the christmas effect can be seen in full value here.

Post your thoughts on this data, hopefully this is debunked once and for all.

More reasoning:

Also, if most people bought the hack with their Wiis, there should be a similar curve between the Wii HW sales and the TP SW sales curves. Yet we don't see that happening.

If you look at the Wii versus TP Wii weekly sales curve, you see very different curves. Example: The sales of TP should go up in Jan 2010 Wii sales spike, but it doesn't.

There is a much easier explanation.

There are more Zelda fans and people genuinely interested in the game as a launch game than there are hackers interested in the Twilight Hack. But yes, this is strenghtened by the facts you posted.

So, 'TP hack barely did anything'.

I got a wii around christmas time and read up how to hack it and immediately went and got TP for it just to do that, :o sorry mate your logic is flawed based on when wii's sell.

whats the twilight hack?

Pretty much.

Great research, Happy Dolphin, but anyone that claims TP sales are overbloated because of the hack is grossely uninformed, being willfully malignant and/or failed to take their meds that day.

What's this Twilight Hack you speak of?

From OP -> (I can concede a negligeable 10% of TP Wii sales as an overhead value to the curves)

So your logic is that the hack sales are proportional to the Wii Sales, and so it's impossible to pinpoint what is a hack sales and what is not. Yet if you look at the Wii versus TP Wii weekly sales curve, you see very different curves. So I'm not sure you are in the norm, rather you would be the outlier. Example: The sales of TP should go up in Jan 2010 Wii sales spike, but it doesn't.

In other words: The christmas SW sales of TP are typical of any Nintendo game that sells to families during that period. You would be the outlier part of the 10%. ;)

@Viper1. Thanks :O)  I know it isn't perfect logic, but it's pretty solid. Add the above logic of the discrepancy between the Wii HW and TP Wii Sales curves and its pretty spot on.

@Everyone asking about the Twilight Hack. 

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Twilight_Hack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_hack

The Twilight hack became irrelevant after a year when easier methods came out, so any sales increases as a result would have been minor. Not to mention most that specifically wanted it just for the hack, would have purchased a pre-owned copy.

the twilight hack was basically a game save for legend of zelda twilight princess, the save included a horse who's name was longer than 24 characters which is the max amount of memory that the wii has set aside for the characters name, as such as soon as you load up the save and talk to an npc who would talk about your horse the game freezes and crashes from a memory overflow, killing the wiis protection at the time of the crash to run unsigned code and as soon as the crash happens the homebrew channel can be installed and from there you can run any unsigned code from that channel, it was kinda the same as the 1x1png that causes the original psps to crash into a hackable state.

Edit !!! this doesn't work anymore btw!!! so do not be looking up how to twilight hack your wii, there was a fix to stop it happening but like someone here said it's not the method used to hack wiis now the bannerbomb way is far easier and doesn't envolve you buying a particular game.

I would imagine that the prevalence of the hack is overblown on the internet. Much like you cannot listen to internet hype when attempting to predict a games sales, I'd say the majority of those likely to exploit the hack would be found online anyway, and not in the wider population.