Soleron said:
The first two Paper Marios never held up system sales. I mean, I love them, it's a great series, but it's appeal is to those who will be early 3DS adopters anyway. Even if Nintendo plays it right, I think NGP will outsell 3DS in the first Christmas simply because 3DS will take time to build a mass audience like the DS did, while a great number of people who own a PSP or PS3 will jump on this right away. Of course 3DS will do better in the long run as long as it gets the DS 20m titles out. |
Nintendo's launching 3DS with Nintendogs 2, that marks a pretty different first step from what they did with DS and more in line with what they did with Wii. They're catering to both segments upfront (like Wii), and they have heavy 3rd party content that appeals to core audiences... honestly, I think there's a good argument that more PSP owners will probably buy a 3DS than a NGP initially. And supply alone probably means we'll see orders of magnitude more 3DSes sold than NGPs over the holiday season.
As for Paper Mario 3, the first two games were mid/late cycle releases, not "launch year". A better comparison would probably be Super Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi 2... they're not so much hardware drivers in and of themselves, but rather strong support games that sell a few million and help flesh out the library. Actually the holiday 2011 3DS lineup is eerily similar to the holiday 2005 DS lineup: Mario Kart, Animal Crossing and a Mario RPG. I expect Kid Icarus in the fall will probably also continue selling well over the holiday.
