It sold 1.67M copies in 8 months, being (obviously) a Switch exclusive. There aren't a lot of new fighting IPs, and the most recent one that I can think of is Injustice, that sold 3.99M copies across 5 different platforms, but it had a cast of well-known DC characters.

People like to compare it to Splatoon, but you have to keep in mind that fighting games don't sell nearly as well as shooters.

Anyway, was ARMS a flop even for fighting-games standards?

No

May not be a smash hit, but i doubt it was a failure

Fighting game standards.... Outsells every fighter aside from maybe 3 or 4 franchises....

Arms cant have cost much to make tbh... so its most likely a (huge) success (financially atleast).

considering it still has good legs I think it'll end up being a success, it'll easily sell 2M units, perhaps even 3...

I'm sure it was profitable. Not every game has to be a multimillion seller to be a success

Not, i'ts possible that Nintendo expected more, but not every new IP can be a Splatoon for them

this has sold possible 2 million including digital at full price. and given how little Nintendo discounts its software it might get as high as 2.5 million full price.

I will definitely say not a flop.

No, Nintendo probably made profit with only 500k sold copies, and at end game will easily be 2m+.

Considering how cheap Nintendo's prototyping is, and the Mario Kart 8 team worked on it (they're so damn efficient) I doubt it was a flop financially. What was it at last...1.6M units sold? The game is not model heavy, art directors most likely didn't spend much on R&D of graphic technology, most likely pulled shaders and lighting techniques straight from Mario Kart 8. But eh, I'm digging too deep, short answer is probably not. For a new IP in the traditional fighting genre, I think it did quite well.