It feels really weird even mentioning Zelda as a franchise and dead in the same sentence. This isn’t about whether the series is getting better or worse, but simply looking at its performance from a sales perspective. Keep in mind that Spirit Tracks, despite selling 3.04 million copies world wide, was mostly considered by Nintendo to be a failure in sales because it was well below their expected sales level. Likewise, Skyward Sword has basically stopped selling altogether and is currently sitting pretty still at the 3.01 million mark, which is well below all previous console Zelda titles save Majora’s Mask, whose lifetime sales with its re-release on the VC have likely pushed well past that mark.