Yeah, Nintendo must have just felt like turning the servers off for two hours on one of the most important days of the year for their online service, conveniently within a half-hour after New Super 2 and Oni Tore became available for download. The chances of the downtime having anything to do with demand for one of the biggest releases of the year in its launch hour is obviously negligible.

Come off it. Of course New Super 2 didn't sell as well as its predecessors FW, whatever its digital sales might be. But if it was a 0.1% decrease, would you go so far as to say that "2D Mario is in decline?" Probably not, as even though it would be mathematically true, in practice that would be a completely insignificant difference. So the question is -- at what point does the difference become significant? 2%? 15%? 40%? The game still sold more physical units in its first week than all but eight games have sold in Japan YTD. Add in the variable digital sales and it could even already be in the top 5. Does that sound like "decline" to you? This is a series built on legs. Let's talk again in a few years and determine how much the series' sales have "declined."

As pointed out earlier, through simple arithmetic we can determine that Nintendo shipped over 1 million units in preparation. They obviously didn't expect New Super 2 to sell 1 million FW, which means it wasn't their intention to have an amazing sell-through. They simply wanted to have enough units on shelves to meet demand -- possibly for its first two or three weeks. This renders the reasoning of the OP completely baseless.

Sure, maybe 2D Mario is in decline. But there's no evidence to be found in this thread that supports that conclusion. It's just an impulsive reaction to a sequel having lower FW sales than the first game, without taking into account ANY factors other than an immeasurable perceived general interest in the series. Even if this game does perform significantly more weakly than the first two New Supers, you shouldn't extrapolate a "trend" based on the sales of a single game in a series, especially with another game in the same series coming out in just a few months.

This thread is silly.

Digital numbers?  Yeah I know them, crap.  Because it is digital japan sales, they always crap.  Is why they get a lot of stuff released on disc the west only ever gets as a digital release.

When CoD maps packs release they sell millions in a space of hours, don't see PSN or XBL going down because of it, so if NSMB2 brings down the 3DS shop then Nintendos online system is probably just poor.