"Good thing they didn't put it on the Vita!"

I keep seeing this awful comparison of software sales to hardware sales, but I'm not sure I understand the logic behind it. Every time I attempt to, my brain tries to eat itself. So please, if you are you someone who believes that install bases are finite things or if you live in an alternate universe where hardware sales drive software sales rather than the other way around, tell me why you believe this utter madness.

About what else would we troll this week? there is nothing really to troll about except for that this week..

It's kind of a mutual relationship though. They both affect each other, in the case of NSMB for instance it's clear that software drove hardware but at the same time the hardware base had a huge effect on the software sales.

I think I remember seeing a few people on this site who hailed from that universe.

That said, I don't think MH would have sold quite as well on the Vita. The MH faithful would have bought one, but it clearly has a larger market to attract on the 3DS.

it's easy, if it was a Vita game, there would now be more copies of the game then consoles, which is bad, because you need a Vita to play it.

it also outsold the wii u

Would have sold just as well had it been on Vita. Vita HW sales would also be a lot higher due to the game coming to Vita. Its that simple. I know people that bought a 3DS last year purely of the basis that MonHun 4 was coming to it eventually. 1 had never cared for Nintendo titles and tbh only owns like 2 Nintendo games on it (MK7 for MP and KI:U)

Yes, like Wii Sports outsold every platform !

I do think you can find that, sometimes, a game's target audience is resistant to buying a certain platform or a particular console's user base is more receptive to certain games. Certainly JRPGs didn't move the needle much for the 360, and there have been late Wii->PS3 ports that sold better than the original releases despite the much smaller user base.

While the 3DS does offer a potentially larger audience, jumping platforms didn't seem to do much to Monster Hunter's sales one way or the other. Of course we still have to see how the legs turn out, and there are other advantages to the 3DS - like the fact that Nintendo is willing to help push the series in the west, as futile an effort as that may be. But I suspect that at this point, you are either interested in MonHun... or you aren't. So I don't think that the size of the user base means much. I mean, if Capcom had jumped ship mid-generation from the PSP to the DS, Monster Hunter likely wouldn't have sold any better than it already did.

Yup, the "Vita will win because it's an amazing piece of hardware" and some of the PS4 vs One spec battles people.

The case is that Monster Hunter would've sold less on Vita because the 3DS has a more appealing library than it, and for most people a single game isn't enough to warrant the purchase of a system, they buy a system because it has several games they want to play.