Oooooof, that makes the situation sound even worse lol. 1.5m sounds like the high end of estimations.

I mean I'd say it being for sure under 1m is worse than it being up in the air lol. I imagine it would've hit 1m on the Switch 2 if digital sales on there were counted as the Switch 2 version but there's no way to know for sure.

If MP4 doesn't do 1M for either of the platforms per end of Fiscal Year, we might never know with Nintendo only reporting 1m+ sales over the fiscal year going forward (or has breached the top 10 list)

It should be noted that for some reason, Nintendo counts digital sales of Switch 2 editions as Switch 1.

So the chances are it sold over 1m on Switch 2 alone is extremely high, because MP4 has been topping the eshop charts ever since its release, always being above Hyrule Warriors, which was confirmed to have sold over 1m

It’s likely that Switch 1 physical is around 600-700k, with digital being 300-400k, but because they’re counted towards Switch 1, neither one broke 1m “officially”.

MP4 on Switch 1 probably only did around 300k.

Even with poor legs you can still more than double your launch numbers over several years. I think more to the point, what sales numbers were people hoping or expecting in it's first 3 weeks?

All we know is Switch 2 physical sales <1m

Switch1 (total sales) +Switch 2 digital <1m

Considering its biggest platform (S2) has had its sales split in 2, we could technically be looking at 700k + 800k (1.6m). We just don't know...

Doubling the initial sales would be very unusual though considering Metroid games typically having poor legs. Due to that the vast majority of its sales could very well have already come from those initial weeks. If it was at 1.6m by the end of December it could have just a few hundred thousand left in the tank. Also a lot of people were generally expecting it to quickly hit 3m like how Dread nearly did 3m in a few months.

Do we have any sales numbers from a previous games launch to confirm that?

Because the 3month tally that saw Dread achieve 2.6m, is 3 months including black friday OLED bundles etc. We don't know how that was spread across week 1, 3, 7 etc. Without the OLED bundle it likely would have sold slower or more spread out.

Prime 4 exists in a very different context and I think people should treat it as such, best to wait for the next fiscal report before worrying too much.

This week Metroid Prime 4 climbed from 29 to 16 in the UK charts (Switch 2 82%, Switch 18%)

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/02/uk-charts-final-fantasy-vii-remake-intergrade-plummets-as-familiar-faces-retake-the-podium

Doug Bowser said that Dread sold 854k in its first month in the US and in Japan it was at 124k physically by the end of October so include digital for the latter and it was over a million in just over three weeks with just those two countries alone. Add in Europe and everywhere else and it would've been somewhere between 1.5 and 2m for the first month I imagine so you are right that the following couple months did make a big difference.

Prime 4 has the disadvantage of its word of mouth being much worse than Dread's and its following couple months being January and February compared to November and December for Dread so I do think it'll have a worse tail. If its total is say 2m by the end of March I doubt it'd have much more than a couple hundred thousand or so left to go. Now if it's at say 1.9m by the end of December then things are fine but unfortunately the dumb way Nintendo is doing things makes the picture murky.

I expect about 1.5m currently based on how it's compared to Dread's initial sales in the available data. It looks like the initial sales will be lower due to selling notably worse in Japan and Spain though probably not by that much overall since it looks like it had a similar launch in the UK so probably similar in the US too so if reception was strong it doing around Dread numbers long term would've been on the table.

This is as of December 31st.

Glad to hear. Was getting a bit worried given nothing in the investor report, even with the reporting caveats. Hopefully it sells ~ 2 million (or more) lifetime. If we assumed this game cost something like $100 million to publish (say $12.5 million on average for each year of development) that probably is what they'd need to break even. Say Nintendo makes about $51 per copy, after all retail and merchandising expenses, and with price drops. 1.5 million copies sold would be about $76.5 million in revenue. 2 million would be about $102 million in revenue. 

Also if we consider that Prime Remastered somewhat subsidized the development of Prime 4, it isn't as bad as it seems. If Nintendo made $32 per copy sold that would be about $43 million in revenue from Prime Remastered, which obviously didn't cost that much to make. A lot of the technical work on Prime Remastered is shared with/reused in Prime 4. 

Hopefully 2 million copies is hit, and I think if that happens we'll get a Prime 5.