| Barozi said: Well like Boutros said, take a way the bundles and you get a slightly better picture, though that doesn't change that the Nintendo games on Wii are massive. Just saying that Nintendo probably got ~85m software sales just from bundles. Their best move however was to bundle the Wii Wheel into Mario Kart. I bet without that it would've seen much, much less sales (and a lot more illegal downloads). Interesting what a cheap piece of plastic can do for your product. |
Removing bundles doesn't actually change a ton. I presume you're only talking about official bundles, and not store bundles (removing store bundles would be relatively stupid, and also impossible to account for).
Anyway, removing bundles doesn't change up the list much. People are probably thinking mostly about the major Nintendo games for that, but that wouldn't be all that different. Mario Kart Wii, Wii Sports Resort, Wii Play, Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus are all either not bundled or would easily have made 20 million even if not bundled.
I'm not certain about New Super Mario Bros Wii. Unless I'm mistaken, it was first bundled when the red Wii came around (although I'm not sure about that), which was about a year after its launch. At this point, NSMB Wii had sold 16 million. It has since sold 9 more million, and we can't know how much of that is bundled. Still, it would most likely have been at around 20 million even if not bundled. In the 19-21 million range. Considering that it's still selling a bit, it would probably have sold more than 20 million eventually even if it hadn't by now.
And while nearly all of Wii Sports' sales were bundled, it is the game this generation. It's what made the Wii craze, and largely what decided the winner this generation. If you exclude all bundles, this one falls of the list, but I think removing it is just silly. It is - unbunbled - the 6th best selling console game of all time in Japan, and that's the region it made the smallest impact.
In other words, removing bundles drops between 0 and 2 of Nintendo's 20 million sellers depending on how you do it. It doesn't change the 10 million sellers at all, as far as I can tell. The changes on the Ps3 are negligible, and on the X360 you might bump Kinect off the 10 millioner, but I'm not even sure about that. It's sold 17 million, and a very large portion of that time it largely outsold the X360, which means it's not mainly due to bundles.
I think that removing bundles causes bigger issues than it clarifies things, because little changes, and you end up saying the most important game of the generation sold 3.77 million.
On the Mario Kart point, I'm not sure the plastic bundle changed a lot. Mario Kart DS has no plastic wheel, and it sold well over 20 million, as is Mario Kart 7 looking to as well.
Essay Pro