Is Metroid Prime 4 in trouble?

[Norion]

Otter said:

Norion said:

Doubling the initial sales would be very unusual though considering Metroid games typically having poor legs. Due to that the vast majority of its sales could very well have already come from those initial weeks. If it was at 1.6m by the end of December it could have just a few hundred thousand left in the tank. Also a lot of people were generally expecting it to quickly hit 3m like how Dread nearly did 3m in a few months.

Do we have any sales numbers from a previous games launch to confirm that?

Because the 3month tally that saw Dread achieve 2.6m, is 3 months including black friday OLED bundles etc. We don't know how that was spread across week 1, 3, 7 etc. Without the OLED bundle it likely would have sold slower or more spread out.

Prime 4 exists in a very different context and I think people should treat it as such, best to wait for the next fiscal report before worrying too much.

This week Metroid Prime 4 climbed from 29 to 16 in the UK charts (Switch 2 82%, Switch 18%)

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/02/uk-charts-final-fantasy-vii-remake-intergrade-plummets-as-familiar-faces-retake-the-podium

Doug Bowser said that Dread sold 854k in its first month in the US and in Japan it was at 124k physically by the end of October so include digital for the latter and it was over a million in just over three weeks with just those two countries alone. Add in Europe and everywhere else and it would've been somewhere between 1.5 and 2m for the first month I imagine so you are right that the following couple months did make a big difference.

Prime 4 has the disadvantage of its word of mouth being much worse than Dread's and its following couple months being January and February compared to November and December for Dread so I do think it'll have a worse tail. If its total is say 2m by the end of March I doubt it'd have much more than a couple hundred thousand or so left to go. Now if it's at say 1.9m by the end of December then things are fine but unfortunately the dumb way Nintendo is doing things makes the picture murky.

I expect about 1.5m currently based on how it's compared to Dread's initial sales in the available data. It looks like the initial sales will be lower due to selling notably worse in Japan and Spain though probably not by that much overall since it looks like it had a similar launch in the UK so probably similar in the US too so if reception was strong it doing around Dread numbers long term would've been on the table.

Last edited by Norion - 2 days ago