This is why I said that Mario 5 "legitimately" sold 10 million in 7 weeks.

Modern Warfare had an opening week of 8 million copies which was mainly due to preorders, marketing, and hype. It took two more weeks to get to 10 million. Imagine if those pre-orders didn't exist and if core gamers actually waited till the game came out before they purchased it.

That's what Mario 5 did. It's sales were legitimate, not a result of hype. People legitimately wanted the game and it sold out. IT SOLD OUT. We're talking about the disc-based age, not the cartridge age.

During those 7 weeks, if you take away Modern Warfare's "hype" sales, you can see just how badly Mario 5 was bludgeoning it. Mario 5 was outselling Modern Warfare 2 across all platforms till the first week in March. Only then, as Wii hardware supplies were waining, did Mario finally level out.

It has only been the past month or so, really, that we've seen Mario 5's sales dip below Modern Warfare's combined sales. There are reasons for this... Mario Galaxy 2's release, for instance. Rest assured this is not the last we'll see of Mario 5. It will see a sales resurgence during the holidays, Modern Warfare 2 will not. It will keep selling well for years, Modern Warfare will not. Like I said, it is a mainstay title.

The only way Activision can keep Call of Duty a mainstay title is by updating it yearly, but there is no way Black Ops will sell higher than Modern Warfare 2. We're talking about a Treyarch-made Call of Duty. In fact, now that Infinity Ward has been largely disassembled, I expect Call of Duty to be on the decline. One bad game is all it really takes to kill a great franchise.

2d Mario, on the other hand, has a lot of potential. If they created new content and actually gave the game funding, there's no telling how successful it could be. The fact that Nintendo is making Donkey Kong Country and Kirby for this holiday season shows how "relevant" Mario 5 was.

Here's to Mario 6 coming out before I am 30!

In the spirit of succinctness:

Discounting preorders seems disengenuous and I will not do it, because those are still sales. And it continues to sell more than NSMBWii even today.

It's still a multiplatform game versus a single one. That does mean it's not a perfectly clear gague just by raw sales.

Also, MW2 didn't give its systems a sales boost. NSMBWii did. Being killer app should not be discounted either.

But both games have managed to hold onto legs, so it's not really the time to really declare which is bigger.

Again: this is not about which game is bigger, it is about which franchise is currently bigger.

Since the launch of Modern Warfare, the Call of Duty series has sold... what? 45 million units or so, on console alone? 15 million units every year on average, spiking considerably higher.

2-D Mario cannot match that. Multiplatform or not, multipl games or not, the question is what is the biggest franchise.

Even for single games, NSMBWii will finish out the year with something like 20 million units sold - an incredible number. Modern Warfare 2 is there already, and on pace to beat out NSMBWii for every week up until the release of Black Ops.

Being multiplat has nothing to do with anything.

If you mean series, then NSMB sold another 20 million already, and help put the DS in first place, when it was actually close with the PSP before.

Quite right, New Super Mario Bros. is at about 35 million units.... over five years.

It would take a lot of focused spin to paint 2-D Mario as being bigger, in a recent timeframe, than Call of Duty.

Now who's spinning. NSMBWii didn't take all those 5 years to sell that many.

Quite right, New Super Mario Bros. is at about 35 million units.... over five years.

It would take a lot of focused spin to paint 2-D Mario as being bigger, in a recent timeframe, than Call of Duty.

It has been mentioned before, but New Super Mario Bros for the DS took a while to reach 20 million. Call of Duty is already falling. Mario Bros will likely sell even after the Wii 2 is out. Not to mention NSMBWii is only 4 million behind. It may sound laufty, but the game will just keep selling.