The question isn't whether it boosts sales or not, the question is does it boost sales by a significant amount or not. To that I answer that I must say that Smash Bros' brand name is so powerful on it's own that there are probably many people who buy it not paying attention to who comes from where but rather just to play the game. Therefore, I don't believe the amount of sales the game boosts for the series it contains are very relevant.

This. minus the no desire to play Earthbound.

Well my first smash bros game was on the 64 and I can't exactly remember back that far about my game purchases. I have no idea which games I purchased before and after lol.

I think this works both ways.

The other games made SmashBros more appealing. I know lots of people when SmashBros came out wanted to play as Fox and Samus because those characters came from their favorite games. I of course couldn't wait to pair Pikachu up with Mario or fight Mario and Luigi. I'd say the other games benefitted SmashBros and with Melee even more so because you had characters from a ton of other games and then even more so with Brawl. I mean with every game the sales grow bigger and bigger even though GameCube sold less hardware units.

On the other hand I think SmashBros does benefit past games. I know after playing Melee and Brawl I suddenly had the urge to go back and play Ice Climbers and Kid Icarus even though I never played the games back in the day. Also I bet Kid Icarus coming back is partially due to his presence in Brawl. Of course I have always been a huge Nintendo fan so I was already playing all the other franchises long before SmashBros came around. But I have no doubt that SmashBros has caused people to be curious about other Nintendo franchises.

It'll be interesting to see how Kid Icarus does, considering that the franchise has been gone for such a long time. The biggest selling factor will be Pit was in Brawl! Then we'll be able to see just how much SmashBros influences sales!

@Joelcool7
Another good test could have been NPC Pikmin and Pikmin 2, which would suggest SSB doesn't have much of an influence on the general population.

I decided to have fun and see if it did and I tested super mario galaxy

WW sales on March 8th (Before Brawl Week)
45,807

WW sales on March 15th (Brawl release week)
58,911

WW on 22nd

75,693

Maybe it does?

You know, you may be on to something, there!

It does, but I think only to relatively minor degrees.

Case in point: Ice Climber. Game would get virtually zero VC sales, but since it's been made known via Smash Bros, many people are familiar with it and have decided to check out the original game.

Made me interested in Fire Emblem.

Made me wanna try the Earthbound/Mother games since Lucas was my fav character :)

But other than that I already knew most of the characters, it really didn't have that big of an effect for me