| stof said: Yikes. It's kind of hard to think of a weirder argument to make... Galaxy is still selling great. |
Both I and Nintendo disagree: business-wise, Mario Galaxy is something of a failure, which I believe Malstrom is pointing out. Unlike Malstrom though, I'd like to try and explain how this conclusion arose.
No matter what perspective you use, the game has underperformed in the market. Yes, it's narrowly outsold Sunshine, but then again it has over twice the number of users that it can appeal to (a figure which is growing), so slightly edging out one of the weakest Mario platformers ever is not particularly impressive: indeed, I find it revealing that it still lags far behind Mario 64, despite having a larger userbase (will it ever pass 64? I'm highly skeptical...). And unlike most games, the userbase argument actually means something: we know that Mario platformers can crack ten million with ease. We know that another Mario platformer is currently tearing up the charts, and has outsold Galaxy 2:1 (and growing). There is more than enough interest in Mario platfomers to greatly exceed Galaxy's sales potential, if Nintendo can tap into that interest. Demonstrably, Galaxy has hit only a fraction of the people interested in Mario platformers, making it a failure.
It should also be noted that the other Mario platformer, the 2D one, continues to sell phenomenally, and not just in Japan. Even accepting the statement that 3D Mario performs best in America, NPD shows New Super Mario Bros. routinely hanging around the Top 20 All Formats chart, meaning it's sold in the neighborhood of 100,000 a month: even after almost three years, it's common for NSMB to be in the top ten, including appearances this year. By contrast, Galaxy hasn't been seen in the top thirty in over a year. The best it can hope for is a top-ten Wii-only appearance, usually towards the bottom, and then only irregularly. Yeah it's still selling, but we have demonstrable and ineffable proof that Mario platformers can and should be performing much better than Galaxy is.
We also should take a very close look at Miyamoto's statement: they wanted Galaxy to sell like a 2D Mario. But we've already seen that it has failed to reach this goal, and by a large margin at that. By Nintendo's own terms, Galaxy has failed. More importantly, it tells us that Nintendo itself is very much aware that there is a difference between the market performance of 2-and-3D Mario games. Not that we need that statement to tell us so: the fact that they're releasing a 2D Mario for Wii is admission enough.
So Galaxy has not sold well, and is still not selling as well as it should. How does this relate to Malstrom's larger argument that Galaxy is responsible for the system doing poorly in Japan (something which I also feel is true)? Simple: Mario platformers have been the primary draw for nearly every Nintendo console.
Super Mario Bros. was the NES, and SMB3 was a massive cultural phenonemom that sold gangbusters and prolonged the system's life. Mario World is far and away the best-selling game on the system: the runner up (several million behind) is Mario All-Stars. Mario 64 is the same. Even on the handhelds, Mario Land was only outsold by Pokemon and Tetris: Mario Advance (a remake of Mario 2) is second only to Pokemon games. And on the DS, only the combined SKU's of Nintendogs top it. And while DKII would know better, I'm willing to bet that 2D Mario are the best-selling VC titles But with time Mario platformers have stopped mattering so much: Sunshine sold less than Melee and Mario Kart (a first!) And Galaxy has been outsold by six different Wii titles already...
Long story short, Galaxy has not done its job: its not attracting as many users to the system as most of its predecessors did. It's particularly failed at this in Japan; it even got outsold by Mario Party! Is it true that the Wii's problems in Japan stem "entirely" on Galaxy? No, as Nintendo and third-parties haven't done a good enough job of providing a compelling stream of software to make up for Galaxy's failure. But is it fair to blame the star quarterback for the team's loss when he played more like Alex Smith than his usual Tom Brady performance? I believe it is. Hopefully, NSMBWii will rectify this.
But for the record, I still want more 3D Marios myself, and Galaxy was awesome. 
