MP3 suffered a bit from being released early in the wii's lifetime. I really wanted to buy it at release but didn't cause i still couldn't find a wii. It's on my xmas list now so hopefully I get it then, otherwise i'll buy it after the holidays.

...but to say it fell "waaaay short of expectations" is stupid. MP1 was the highest selling metroid game in the entire series with a LTD of 2.77M. Metroid has never been a huge series sales wise and MP3 has a fair amount of room for growth still.

I skipped Echoes (until earlier this years), but I bought Corruption on day 1.

Nintendo is the reason Prime 3 didn't sell better. WTF? There was hardly any hype for Prime 3 until a couple of weeks before launch. Then, when the game did launch, they used that year old "Wii would like to play" ad campaign. Corruption should have been a mega-event, but I guess advertising to the casuals is more lucrative than selling a well made hardcore game to the hardcore.

isn't that true? a hardcore gamer gets the game anyway ads or no ads.

a casual doesn't even know about a game without ads

MP2 sales were disappointing though. Beating them should be the minimum.

I think a lot of more hardcore games are going to have really long legs for the wii, as more hardcore gamers drift towards buying the hardware as a second console, and more casual gamers start to explore games with more depth.

Something that I have noticed with the Wii is that many of Nintendo's big franchises have been released to 'disapointing' sales and then crept along weekly until they have passed many people's sales expectations.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Mario Party 8 are probably the best examples of this ... At the rate it is going The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will probably add at least another 800,000 units and pass A Link to the Past and become the third best selling Zelda game ever from Wii sales alone; when you add in Gamecube sales it will likely pass the original to become the second best selling Zelda ever. At the same time Mario Party 8 has already become the best selling Mario Party ever and continues to sell at a steady rate, this is inspite of the fact that it is probably the worst Mario Party game ever.

 Who's expectations?  I never read any sales predictions from either Nintendo or Retro.

Nintendo really needs to ramp up the marketing on Metroid.  It's a spectacular series and it would do much better in sales if they just put some hype behind it.  I bet if they put a marketing push behind MP3 even now it'd sell 2 million. 

NOE screwed MP3 in Europe because of lacking shipment, before long, the game was gone and FIFA/PES etc... all took over.

Constantly sold out for weeks because of low shipments. You can get away with that with hardware but not with software. With software, consumers just move on to something else, just look at Z&W.

hunter_alien = anti-nintendo troll

the game deserves to sell better,though its still selling well and should easily pass MP2 also those for MP2 are shipped not sold because when it disappeared from the charts it wasnt at 800k

The whole "Big Three" thing was conceived by Nintendo fans, without an accurate understanding of the sales history of each franchise. Let's look at the previous installments in the (main) series for Mario, Smash Brothers, and Metroid:

Super Mario 64

Nintendo

1.92

6.87

3.10

11.89

Super Mario Sunshine

Nintendo

0.87

3.73

1.31

5.91

	Super Smash Bros Melee	Nintendo	1.44	4.06	1.08	6.58
	Super Smash Bros	Nintendo	1.97	2.93	0.65	5.55

	Metroid Prime	Nintendo	0.12	1.92	0.73	2.77
	Metroid	Nintendo	1.04	1.35	0.34	2.73
	Metroid II: Return of Samus	Nintendo	0.56	0.86	0.34	1.76
	Metroid Fusion	Nintendo	0.18	1.08	0.29	1.55
	Super Metroid	Nintendo	0.71	0.58	0.13	1.42
	Metroid Prime 2: Echoes	Nintendo	0.07	0.80	0.37	1.24

Metroid is simply not as big of a series. Like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, and many other titles, it's a "hardcore" franchise that receives Internet press far out of proportion to its actual popularity. Compared to the standard of other recent Metroid games, Corruption looks like a fairly average entry in the series. I agree that it's underperformed - I expected about 2m, and it's clearly going to end up well short of that - but this game never belonged in the same category as Galaxy or Brawl. Only diehard Nintendo fans could have seriously expected this game to sell 5m units.