(3) Entirely separate.

Counting it as entirely separate, with no nod to a relationship whatsoever, completely ignores the fact that Star Fox 2 is exclusively available this way. You can't do that.

I saw this discussion in the other thread yesterday.

Entirely separate.

So by what logic should it be entirely separate as opposed to separate but related?

I can see option 2 working in some cases; you can compare Super Mario Bros 2 with Super Mario Bros 3 while counting both their rereleases on GBA. However I’d say it’s unfair if there was no (comparable) rerelease for a certain game; I wouldn’t compare Yoshi’s Island with it’s GBA rerelease to Yoshi’s Story. Bringing releases on the classic consoles into it becomes even more murky though, is the SNES Classic bought for Star Fox?

Counting SNES Classic sales towards the original SNES number is not a good idea in my opinion. People use sales statistics in many different, unique ways, and the only person that this benefits is the guy who just wants to say that the SNES outsold the PS1. More people want to know how the SNES fared against the Genesis without those numbers being obscured by a mini console released decades later.

I would argue that every game on it has people that bought it for them. Some games likely had more people with them in mind than others, I'm sure, but I'm confident that every game has its reasonable percentage.

For me, Star Fox was absolutely one of the titles in question (in conjunction with Star Fox 2).

I did also buy it with the intention of hacking and adding a few titles to it for the convenience instead of digging out the SNES and using wired controllers, but ultimately the built-in titles (and particularly StarFox 2) were easily a large consideration there.

I also believe that, had it been packed with different sets of games, it would have easily sold less/more than it did/does, so the games included are absolutely factors in it selling. Plus NA/PAL got a different selection of titles than Japan, so not every single person got the same titles when buying them - just like Wii Sports & the Wii, etc - and I know people that went out of their way to import a Japanese model so they could have those titles instead.

Furthermore, official Tetris standalone plug-and-play devices are typically included when they calculate total Tetris sales, and even though each Tetris release is wildly different in available game modes and control options, they are all part of the grand total "Tetris" sales count (however, there are still very distinct numbers reported for each individual release as well).

All this considered, as I stated early on, I do agree that option #1 is obviously the wrong choice, as they ARE separate releases, but denying a relation and denying software numbers (option #3), I think, is the wrong way to go too.

I don't disagree that probably every title within the mini-console had it's share of buyers that wouldn't have otherwise purchased the item without said game, but that's not quantifiable. If it was, it could make for interesting data, as I'd really be interested in seeing how many people bought the SNES Classic for Star Fox 2, among other things.

But the mini console is a separate product sold in a separate time to a separate audience. And what Tetris sales do you mean? If I owned the Tetris brand, I would want to include all plug 'n play devices as well to the sales figure. It depends on what the metric is used for.

In my opinion, sales data would be tampered if we counted each SNES Classic sale as a separate sale for each individual game within the mini-console, as well as a sale for the SNES as well. And even if you tried to slice it up into fractions of a sale, that just makes a mess of things, and overall makes the data that's already been compiled less meaningful. I'm sure there were more SNES Classics sold than many of the games on it's roster, so adding those sales numbers in would affect things drastically.

It was recently reported that Minecraft has become the best-selling game of all time, across all releases, surpassing all forms of Tetris at something like 170m.

I'm sure it was a great report.

Edit: Sorry, I just didn't know what else to say. Most of the people on VGChartz like to use sales data as a way of comparing console game sales. There is no official sales number method. If you want to treat them as separate but related (which I'm not even sure what that means) then you can do that. I just don't want to see all of the historical sales figures gone.