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Soundwave on 29 May 2023
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Norion said:
Soundwave said:

The Wii U had troubling sales metrics even from the immediate launch ... I don't think the Switch is anywhere near as successful if BOTW was "NSMB" instead. 

Even Nintendo fans are a pain in the ass for Nintendo on this, they won't let Nintendo off the hook if they don't have some kind of "epic" Nintendo title at launch. 

Luigi's Mansion for the GameCube was kind of the same thing "where's Mario 64-2? Why isn't this Mario 64-2? When are we getting Mario 64-2? Well fuck it I'm not buying until I see a Mario 64-2, I'm not buying a system for a little Luigi spin-off". 

But I guess it is what it is, Sony can launch a Playstation home console with a middling lineup and its no big deal, but for Nintendo they have to prove themselves all over again to their fans every new system even though it's just factual reality that if you like Nintendo IP you're gonna have to buy the Nintendo system regardless of the timing of those games. 

If you're Nintendo you need to make sure you have a new big ticket franchise installment of a series that really shows off the new hardware well. 

2D Mario is huge though, the ones on DS and Wii both sold over 30m. The "New" series of games has gotten tiring but if an exciting original one gets made it'll be among their biggest system sellers I think.

I think what happened was there hadn't been a new 2D Mario in such a long time and it played in perfectly with the more casual gamer approach the DS and Wii were going for, that it was a big deal then. 

NSMBU and NSMB2 on the Wii U and 3DS though ... and even really Mario Run on smartphones ... they sold quite a bit, but I think it was more like "oh OK, so you're doing this again, huh, I just played this a few years ago on my Wii/DS?" type of feeling with a lot of consumers.

And now with Switch it's kind of a different generation altogether, the 16-30 year olds driving Switch adoption ... they grew up with the GameCube and N64 and so on. 3D analog stick Mario is just normal to them, so now we see the gap between 2D Mario and 3D Mario is no longer that big anymore. 

You could kinda see this trend on Wii U and 3DS also ... NSMBU and Mario 3D World sold about the same, so did NSMB2 and Mario 3D Land. Neither NSMBU or NSMB2 I think were the system seller that Nintendo was hoping for (Nintendo banked hard on NSMB2 + cheap 2DS being a huge seller, but the 3DS didn't really see much sales acceleration, I believe it's first year holiday season with 3D Land + Mario Kart 7 remained the 3DS' best holiday season). 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 29 May 2023