Wait what?

Have 3rd parties failed to sell more than 10 million of anything during all these years (I’m not sarcastic)?

Well on Wii I’m not that surprised because most big studios pit out crap and a lot of the good games where new IPs from small studios (I still love you Cursed Mountain). But still I thought someone would manage to do something that sold well.

Monster Hunter 4 sold 8.3 million on 3DS. I’d say this has a very good chance of exceeding that.

But if we’re talking 3rd party developed software, there are many games developed by third parties that have sold over 15 million on Nintendo consoles. Of course, most of these are published or co-published by Nintendo. While technically third party games, they’re colloquially called “second party” - which actually isn’t a real thing since the second party is technically the buyer in a transaction; and third parties are creators of any component outside the first party to add to the item being sold. 

But even Pokémon games aren’t true “second party” games either, since they’re only co-published by Nintendo.

COD, Final Fantasy, GTA, Red Dead, Skyrim. What else surpasses 10M sales in a single SKU, third party?

The multiplatform way carries an illusion of big sales, but in the better case scenario, are divided by 2. 

PS4 has 7 physical games with this metric.

It's not easy to archive 

You're correct that 2nd party doesn't really exist in the industry, but what actually solidifies if a game is first party or not isn't publishing rights or who developed the game, it's IP control. 

Nintendo confirmed this when they listed Astral Chain explicitly as a first party IP even before owning the entire IP. If you own a controlling share (which Nintendo do because they own parts of the other companies invested in Pokemon) or half or more of an IP, it's first party to Nintendo. So yes, in this scenario, Just Dance 3 is the best selling third party. 

I was going to say it wouldn't beat Minecraft's total sales on Nintendo systems, but after checking it, i think it already has? So yeah, only Just Dance 3 and Capcom making an "ultimate" version stand in the way of becoming that.

Ha! T-bone is predicting 7+ in japan alone.

heh but tbone is johnlucas2.0

I think Minecraft could be over 15mil on the Switch the way it always charts everywhere, but we don't official numbers sadly.
MHR has a very good chance at reaching 10mil on the Switch alone.

That Minecraft number on Wikipedia is literally only Japan physical and a random 500k from Europe. It couldn't be more incomplete. The way Minecraft always charts everywhere every week it has to be way, way higher than 2mil.

Was just about to comment that people constantly forget about Minecraft for whatever reason, only game with higher potential is some GTA Switch launched with the Pro or Switch 2. Minecraft is severally under-tracked due to lack of digital and NPD actually providing revenue based charts; in Japan it didn't even launch physically until one year had passed; meaning that we have very little idea about it's total sales there which could already have surpassed 3 million in Japan alone. 

In terms of future games, there is always a potential for some third party game to be a break-out hit, but with Monster Hunter Rise you are pretty much looking at one of the biggest games that could launch by a Third Party in Japan and Asia. We are talking about the game selling over 6 million in the region this year alone before we even look at North America, Europe and RotW.