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Aielyn said:

the_dengle said:

This isn't at all surprising to me. Mario games, especially the 2D ones, rely on their legs for sales. They don't usually have record-breaking first week sales. Zelda games, though, tend to be frontloaded. Twilight Princess is an interesting case in that it had a strong opening AND good legs.

NSMB Wii, week 1 in US: 838,236
Skyward Sword, week 1 in US: 604,477

2D Mario tends to have longer legs - that is, the proportion of early sales to lifetime sales tends to be smaller... but it has such high lifetime sales that it normally still outperforms Zelda in terms of launch sales, even at its strongest. But then, there's been three 2D Marios in just over three years, and they're not dramatically distinct from each other (compare SMB1, 2 (western), and 3 and how much different each one is).

Eh. New Super Wii wasn't a launch title like U. Neither was Skyward, sure, but at that point you're comparing a 25m+ game with a 3.5m+ game. The fact that it required Motion + likely didn't help Skyward's sales either, nor the barren wasteland of Wii releases surrounding it. Twilight Princess was also THE Wii game to buy at launch, whereas New Super U is one of many great Wii U launch games.

And it irks me a bit how much people want to compare SMB1 & 2 West and use that as evidence that Mario games are supposed to change dramatically from one installment to the next. The second true SMB game was Lost Levels, practically identical to SMB1 except for level design, whereas SMB2 wasn't a Mario game at all until it was localized. It was actually initially released as a completely different game. It's not as though someone at Nintendo at that time said, "We need to drastically change the Mario series to bring new experiences to the players." What they said was, "I bet we can get this really weird game to sell well in America if we replace everything in it with Mario stuff!"