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MTZehvor on 11 May 2017
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Wyrdness said:
h2ohno said:
Metroid's problem has been that it doesn't sell in Japan. It sells fine in the US, but in Japan it has always struggled. That might be why Other M was a letdown compared to the Prime games. It didn't cater to western interests and the Japanese audience wasn't going to buy it anyway.

It has more problems then that it requires a specific taste from the player as it's more complex in what you need to play through it compared to most games, Prime for one sold as much as it did because people thought it was going to be a Halo clone which is a big reason Echoes had a massive drop in sales. Even when we factor in that Metroid games on average sell 1m it's almost always over a long period which compared to other first party games is unflattering especially for the amount of effort it requires to develop Metroid games, it takes as much resources to make Metroid as it does the tier 1 first party titles like Mario and Zelda but the returns from it are much much lower.

Other M actually sold well as Metroid goes ironically it sold around 1.4m which is what Super Metroid hit on SNES, the series was never strictly a western one that's a misconception it was always sold to the same dedicated fanbase as even with flaws OM hit the usual series mile stone. This is because the are very few alternatives to the series it requires a unique taste as mentioned but at the same time that taste brings in a dedicated fanbase that isn't big but decent enough.

Sort of, but that comes with a major caveat; a much larger than normal portion of the sales came long after the game's release. Sadly VGC doesn't have a ton of data on shipments over time until 7th gen titles, so all I really have to compare Other M to is Metroid Prime 3, which has sold about 1.8 million to date. Prime 3 sold 1 million in its first four months, and had 1.5 of it's 1.8 million copies sold by the end of 2008. 55% of its copies sold to date were sold within four months, and 83% were sold within a year and a half of launch. By comparison, Other M only sold 700K within its first four months (prompting this response from Reggie Fils-Aime), and hadn't even hit 1 million within its first year and a half (51% and 70% of sales to date, respectively).

This might not normally be a problem, but a big reason why Other M sold relatively well in the years after was due to sizeable discounts. In other words, the game may have wound up selling as well as other Metroid titles, but it wasn't making anywhere near as much money for Nintendo.