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Norion on 29 May 2023
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Soundwave said:
Norion said:

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). 

Them getting lazy with 2D Mario leading to that is unfortunate. A series like that deserves an entry with as much creativity as Odyssey and not just an enhanced port of a game from the previous system. It's probably too late for the Switch to get a proper original entry but hopefully the successor does since it's wild how Nintendo has neglected 2D Mario recently despite its sales potential.