A lot of people (like me) think the Metroid franchise is one of the best in the world. But the sales do not reflect this.
In the chart below I've collected the sales of the Metroid games that are tracked on VGchartz. The original Metroid game is still the 2nd best selling in the franchise, with double the sales of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime 3!
In Japan the franchise is barely selling at all anymore, which I guess is fine, the Japanese don't like this type of games. But what about America and Others sales?
| Game | Japan | America | Others | Total |
| Metroid (NES) | 1.04m | 1.35m | 0.34m | 2.73m |
| Super Metroid (SNES) | 0.71m | 0.58m | 0.13m | 1.42m |
| Metroid Fusion (GBA) | 0.18m | 1.08m | 0.29m | 1.55m |
| Metroid Prime (GCN) | 0.12m | 1.98m | 0.73m | 2.83m |
| Metroid Prime 2 (GCN) | 0.07m | 0.84m | 0.38m | 1.29m |
| Metroid Prime 3 (Wii) | 0.07m | 0.85m | 0.55m | 1.47m |
| Metroid Prime Hunters | 0.11m | 0.57m | Not tracked | 0.68m |
After the rebirth on the franchise on GCN, with quite good sales on a console with a small install base, you would think the franchise had the perfect opportunity to keep growing, but the opposite has happened.
Metroid Prime was the 7th best selling game on GCN, which is quite good, but it was also by far the best game on the entire platform, maybe with the exception of Resident Evil 4.
Metroid Prime 2 did only 1.29m, making it the 28th best selling GCN game, but the GCN was a dying platform by then, so that partly explains the weak result.
The surprising thing is that Metroid Prime 3 barely did any better than Prime 2! Only 1.47m sales, the 25th best selling game on the platform! The game was barely advertised of course, and the advertisement campaign for some stupid reason was directed at the casuals which I think hurt sales a lot. Casuals will never play Metroid.
1.47m isolated is a respectable number, but as Metroid is the 3rd most respected Nintendo franchise after Mario and Zelda, this is quite weak, especially considering the development costs of the Metroid games. The big question is will Nintendo keep putting resources into developing great Metroid games when the sales are so low compared to their other franchises?
What can be done to get the Metroid sales up where they belong?
