I wouldn't necessarily equate Nintendo's marketing strategy with whether or not they desperately need something to succeed.  Nintendo really, really needed the Wii U to succeed, and they sent that thing off to die with no marketing whatsoever.

It will be interesting to see how it fared in the US. It would show if this is just continued advertisement, or a desperate act to move product that isn't exactly selling. We know it's opening sales and legs haven't been great really anywhere that we get numbers and charts from. So, we'll have to see what it did stateside. 

NPD will be ranking Labo as normal software right? Pretty sure every other chart has Labo on it but just wanted to make sure. Will be curious to see how it ranked for April.

People are still pushing this narrative that Labo is a failure? It was #3 last week in Japan, and has been in the top 5 since launch according to Media Create. That's not half-bad for a Toy released outside Christmas. Labo isn't a conventional game release, it'll depend heavily on holiday momentum and future releases.

They're is some room between complete failure and success, you know. Saying that it's not a success doesn't mean it's a huge failure.

But its too early to call Labo a success or a failure. It's a unique product, even by Nintendo standards. It's going to depend a lot more on evergreen sales and holiday pushes. You know, like a Toy. Not to mention that most of Nintendo's "blue ocean" type software like Nintendogs and Brain Age typically have modest sales at the start, but remain consistent high sellers over time. Labo is already showing some promise in that regard. 

The whole point of Labo was to attract kids and a more casual audience, which would in turn boost Switch sales, which is why Nintendo was expecting to ship 20M units this fiscal year. That has not happened. So, as far as its intended purpose goes, it has failed. Now, it may pick up during the holidays, but we'll have to wait and see how that plays out.

As far as sales go, it's not a failure per se. However, its sales aren't anything to get excited about, either. It opened low in the UK and continues to plummet each week. I'm sure the same is happening across EU. Japan has had a better result, but it's still not a runaway success, and has only sold ~50% of its initial shipment, even though one of those weeks was Golden Week. And while we'll have to wait to see how it debuted in the US, we also haven't got any stories about how successful it has been in the past 3 weeks, which makes me believe it wasn't that big of a hit. Now, we have Nintendo paying a big price for Ariana Grande and the Tonight Show to push it. That kinda also points to them trying hard to push units that aren't selling. 

I don't know if Nintendo's marketing department knows that Ariana is not a kid anymore and her appeal to kids is weak. This isn't gonna make teenagers or adults interested.

That's kind of the point. Nintendo isn't expecting an instant monster hit. They're expecting Labo to grow as a product and that will depend entirely on the legs it has. Sure, it's sales so far aren't anything spectacular, but the fact that it's been in the Top 5 in Japan according to Media Create for 3 weeks straight shows that it's a consistent seller at least. The real test of Labo's longevity will be Christmas time, which is where Toys usually make the bulk of their sales. The mistake people are making with Labo is that they're looking at it through the lens of a conventional game release, but that's not really what Nintendo's going for with Labo. This is a Toy, and Nintendo is treating it as such, so its off to a decent start in that regard. 

As for Europe, well that's to be expected. Europe's always been Nintendo's weakest market, so it makes since Labo would debut lower there than in Japan or US, and US is still up in the air as NPD is notoriously slow with releasing monthly sales figures. 

Do toys people buy for the holidays typically require another $300 purchase to actually use the toy? Seems more like a video game to me.