Will Astro's Playroom outsell Wii Sports and become the highest selling console exclusive?

[JWeinCom]

Cobretti2 said:

JWeinCom said:

Wii Sports sold about 4 million in Japan, never bundled.

Bundles were less common in the US after 2010, and basically nonexistent after 2011. From 2011 onward Wii Sports sold around 9.3 million. In 2011, where anyone who wanted to avoid Wii Sports could have done so pretty easily, it outsold Uncharted 3, Skyrim on the 360, or Arkham City on the 360, all released that year. Also outsold all of those games in 2012 and 2013.

In 2014, 7 years after its release and long after any form of bundling, Wii Sports sold over half a million copies. The DS's best selling game, New Super Mario Bros for comparison, which sold 30 million units and released a few months before Wii Sports, sold less than half that in 2014. PS3's best selling game, Uncharted 3, sold less than 1,000 7 years after its release (the Uncharted Collection on PS4 sold about 600K according to this site). Mario Kart Wii sold under 500K after seven years, and that game sold 35 million copies (many bundled). The Xbox 360's best selling game, Kinect Adventures, is a good comparison, because that again raises the bundle issue. Seven years later, Kinect Adventures was selling less 100K, about 1/6 of what Wii Sports was selling. Point is that Wii Sports had significantly better legs than its competitors for best selling console exclusives, and that's after it was no longer bundled. Which seems to suggest it could have been the best selling exclusive, bundled or not. 

And, keep in mind Wii from 2011 on only sold about 20 million units. Wii Sports attach rate was nearly 50%, and nobody was forced to buy it. I worked in retail, and I'm about 99% sure either NSMBWii or Mario Kart were the default bundles after that point. And, to the extent there may have been Wii Sports/Resort bundles temporarily after (which I don't remember happening after 2010) the Mario ones were available, so nobody had to buy Wii Sports. The attach rate certainly would have been higher even without a bundle, for the first few years. 

This is ignoring the fact that Wii Sports was heavily featured in Wii's ad campaign, was featured in media like the Colbert Report, the Academy Awards, Tropic Thunder, Big Bang Theory, and at the Academy Awards. So, either Wii Sports was a legit cultural phenomena in its own, or Nintendo thought Wii Sports was going to convince people to buy it. 

Which of course brings us to the fact that the Wii was sold out from its launch for a year or two. Wii Fit didn't come out till 2008. Seems pretty reasonable to assume that Wii Sports was a huge part of why people wanted the Wii. While the Switch has a lot of games that have sales comparable to BOTW that launched in its first two years, the only other 10 million seller for the Wii (aside from Wii Play) was Mario Galaxy.

So, even if without bundles, Wii Sports would have sold around 10 million from 2011 on, and had a near 50% attach rate after that. Common sense would indicate that based on the sales patterns of virtually every other game, media presence, and the Wii's success without a ton of other huge sellers, that Wii Sports would have sold much more than that from 2006 to 2011 even without bundles. 

90-95% would be an exaggeration (although maybe not a huge one in terms of early adopters). But an estimate that Wii Sports would have sold to 50% of Wii owners seems incredibly reasonable, if not overly conservative. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it would have sold at least 40 million units without bundles, and 50 million doesn't outlandish. It's clear millions bought the Wii for Wii Sports, and there's a pretty compelling argument that it would be the best selling console exclusive regardless of bundles. And... no offense to Astro's Playroom which seems to be a perfectly fun little pack in, but I don't think anyone seriously things there's a chance it will be nearly as successful.

I did exaggerate a bit but I took a simplistic view.

Gamecube sold 23 million units

WiiU sold 14 million units

I would argue the Nintendo core audience is somewhere between these two numbers as Gamecube actually had pretty decent game support from 3rd parties even compared to Wii.

So lets use 20 million to split the two as the core Nintendo base.

Wii sold 102 million units.

Minus the 20 million core base

That is 82 million Wii's sold to non core Nintendo fans. So what the hell did these people buy one for when the PS360 were so much more powerful and had much better 3rd party support?

Wii Fit is a thing that existed and sold between 20 and 40 million copies depending on how you count plus.

The DS was a huge hit that reinvigorated interest in Nintendo as a whole, and in particular, Mario Kart and 2D Mario (the latter of which wasn't a thing on Gamecube). Just Dance is another thing that existed and undoubtedly moved systems. There were other games that were smaller but undoubtedly moved some machines, Skylanders, Guitar Hero, Mario+Sonic, Zumba. And most of these were available on other systems, but either the other machines required an extra add on to play them, or people maybe wanted something like Guitar Hero, and figured they'd rather buy it on the machine that had Wii Sports or Mario as well. 

There's also the fact that marketing in general was stronger, particularly compared to the Wii, and the price of the Wii was generally lower than the other two systems for most of its life. 

At any rate, sales show that at least past 2011, Wii Sports had around a 50% attach rate. That's monstrous, but still, that means 50% of the people buying one at that point did so for some reason that was not Wii Sports, and we can't be assured that Wii Sports was the primary factor, even for those who did buy the game and the Wii. 

And, if we just look at Japanese sales, the Gamecube sold about 4 million, and the Wii sold nearly 13. Even if there was zero overlap between Gamecube owners and Wii Sports fans (which is pretty doubtful), that leaves us with about 5 million more console owners who bought the Wii for some other reason. 

That being said, in Europe the number of Wii Sports sales, plus Gamecube sales adds up pretty much exactly to the Wii sold. The attach rate was about 87%, but I'm not sure what the bundling situation was there. If it's similar to America, then the attach rate had to stay very high even after the bundles stopped. In the US in 2012, Wii Sports had an attach rate of 75% and was not bundled (in 2011 it was only about 50).

So, Wii Sports would have definitely sold an absurd amount of copies bundle or no, but it's hard to say whether it was the primary factor driving a purchase, or secondary to something like New Super Mario, Mario Kart, or Just Dance. Assessing motivation is nearly impossible at this point.

The one thing we can say with basically 100% certainty is this... More people bought the Wii to play Wii Sports than will buy PS5 to play Astro's Playroom.