Prediction: Mario Wonder 50m+ LT

[Jumpin]

Even if Switch hits 150m, that’s 1/3rd of the userbase so I don’t see it likely hitting 50 million. I also don’t see Animal Crossing’s success as an evidence for why Mario Wonder would do well. 

Animal Crossing isn’t a good comparison because of the nature of the game and unique historical reasons:
1. Animal Crossing was one of the largest cultural phenomena in video game history. It released during the Coronavirus era and became the way many people were interacting during 2020 and into 2021. This skyrocketed the game into selling (at times) faster than any other game on a single platform in the history of video games.
2. Animal Crossing is built for very longterm engagement, months to years. First, it’s the latest of Nintendo’s original casual game franchises where people are provided objectives to complete, then they logout, and come back later to complete more, new things scheduled each day. Second, it’s a sandbox game where people have an endless amount of things to do, personalizing the whole of the island to how they want, and even changing it up for the season. Third, it’s a social game, people visit each other, perform tasks and projects together, check out each other’s stuff, and share items and art with one another. Mario Wonder is a binge and finish title that most people will be done with it in a few days to a month.
3. The sales nature of the game is very different from Mario. People mostly want their own copy of Animal Crossing while Mario will be shared, traded, and resold in large quantities.

I’m not saying Super Mario Wonder won’t sell very highly, what I’m saying is using Animal Crossing as supporting evidence doesn’t really work because it’s a such a different situation and type of game. A better game to compare it to would be Mario Odyssey, NSMB, or Mario 3D.
Even Mario Kart is a different sort of beast as social elements lead to very long term engagement - across years (if my office lunchtime crowd is anything to go by).

I think people are trying to avoid objectivity to support a wished result rather than data-driven estimations. Why ignore the more reliable data? Why resort to looking at the patterns of how other games instead of other Mario platformers?

Last edited by Jumpin - on 24 October 2023