Majin-Tenshinhan said:
That's not even true. The Mario & Luigi series sold better than both Mario RPG or the Paper Mario RPG series did. Paper Mario only increased in sales once it stopped doing the RPG elements. Saying it "wasn't ever as big" is disingenuous. What you actually mean is that you and a certain group of fans want it to be like it used to be, but it's clear that the majority are showing Nintendo that isn't the case. I get that sucks for people who liked the original two Paper Mario RPG, but sales tell the story. |
The sales don't tell the complete story, because they're not complete sales. They only count the original release, but Mario RPG and Paper Mario also released on virtual console, and on the SNES Classic in the case of Mario RPG which is hard to know how to count saleswise. There are also a ton of people like me who probably played one or both of the games for the first time on an emulator. Those all factor into how big the series is overall. Just my intuition, but I'm fairly sure if you released Bowser's Inside Story and TTYD on Switch for the same price TTYD would sell more.
Dulfite said:
Wii 101.64 Super Paper Mario 3.73 3.7% of owners bought this N64 32.93 Original 1.38 4.2% of owners bought this 3ds 74.83 Sticker star 2.41 3.2% of owners bought this GameCube 21.74 TTYD 2.25 10% of owners bought this. Wii U 13.97 Color Splash .87 6.2% Very clearly the TTYD formula was the way to go and why they went with the SS formula once, let alone twice, is beyond me. In any case, this shows that hardware moved very much had a factor in how much software is moved. If TTYD released on Wii U it would have flopped, and if it released on Wii or Switch it would probably be in the 7-10 million sales club. |
That's just not really a good way to use the numbers...Color Splash's attach rate is the second highest, and nearly double that of Sticker Star. Does that mean that people are really warming up to the formula and Nintendo should keep it rolling? No... it just means you're not using the numbers right.
For example... let's take 3D Mario games.
- Mario 64- 36% of owners
- Mario 3D World= 36%
- Super Mario Sunshine- 29% of owners
- Mario 3D Land- 15% of owners
- Mario Galaxy 1= 11%
If we applied the logic I think you're supporting, then we'd have to conclude that the Mario 3D World formula is clearly far superior to the Galaxy formula. Not only does the attach rate beat Galaxy, but it's actually about double that of Galaxy 1 and 2 combined. Although, then we have to deal with the fact that despite following more or less the same formula, 3D Land's attach rate is less than half of 3D World.
What's actually going on is that titles on worse selling systems tend to have higher attach rates, and vice versa. Nintendo's core base, the people that bought the Gamecube and the Wii U, are going to be their biggest fans, and the most likely to buy a first party title. The further you get beyond that core base, the less into Nintendo they are, and the less likely they are to buy any given game. So attach rates for pretty much any first party title are going to be lower. Even Mario Kart Wii (which was heavily bundled and one of the best selling games ever) has an attach rate that is way lower than MK8 on Wii U (36% vs 54%). That doesn't mean that MK8 would have sold 55 million on the Wii.
As an analogy, imagine just one person, the biggest Nintendo fan in the world, bought a Nintendo system. If they released a Paper Mario game on that system, it would very likely have a 100% attach rate. On the other hand if all 6 billionish people in the world bought a Switch it's highly doubtful than anywhere near 100% of them would buy a Paper Mario game on it.
There are other factors. Quality of a game will skew it somewhat, earlier titles tend to have better attach rates and late release titles worse, but in general, attach rate tells you very little about how the game was received, and far more about the system overall.
