Out of Curiosity, I thought I'd look at he series represented in Super Smash Bros Ultimate and see how they relate to the sales of their respective games.
To clarify, I'm only including Nintendo series, and am also excluding Game & Watch due to the abnormal nature of that series. Also, I couldn't find any conclusive numbers for the Mario series, so I left it with a slightly outdated total of 600 million sales.
Series | Sales (Million) | Fighters | S/F Ratio |
Animal Crossing | 35 | 2 | 17.5 |
Donkey Kong | 56 |
3 | 18.7 |
Duck Hunt | 28.3 | 1 | 28.3 |
Earthbound | 1.5 | 2 | 0.75 |
F-Zero | 6.5 | 1 | 6.5 |
Fire Emblem | 11.4 | 7 | 1.63 |
Ice Climber | 2 | 1 | 2 |
Kid Icarus | 3.5 | 3 | 1.2 |
Kirby | 38 | 3 | 12.7 |
Legend of Zelda | 91 | 6 | 15.2 |
Mario | 600* | 8 | 75 |
Metroid | 18 | 4 | 4.5 |
Pikmin | 17.2 | 1 | 17.2 |
Pokemon | 311 | 10 | 31.1 |
Punch-Out | 5 | 1 | 5 |
Robot | 2 | 1 | 2 |
Splatoon | 12 | 1 | 12 |
Star Fox | 12 | 3 | 4 |
Wario | 18 | 1 | 18 |
Wii Fit | 45 | 1 | 45 |
Xenoblade | 4 | 1 | 4 |
Yoshi | 21 | 1 | 21 |
A few things to note:
- Fire Emblem is NOT the series with the most fighters considering its sales. It is only third place. Earthbound/Mother has the largest proportion of reps, followed by Kid Icarus.
- Despite their massive rosters of fighters, Mario and Pokemon arguably deserve more fighters based on the ratio. Mario affiliated series such as Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Wario also err towards the side of having too few fighters representing them.
- There is no general rule considering series with a single representative. Some, like Ice Climber and R.O.B.'s Robot series, come from relatively minor franchises. Others, like F-Zero and Splatoon, are somewhat significant series in their own right. And a few, like Duck Hunt and Wii Fit, arguably deserve more reps.
- If we did include Game & Watch as a series, it would be on par with Wii Fit in terms of having lots of sales despite a lack of reps.
- How long a series has been appearing in the series seems to have only marginal impact. Mario and Pokemon have been around since the N64 entry, but their top competitors, Wii Fit and Duck Hunt, were only introduced in SSB4.
Love and tolerate.