Why Hasn't The Metroid Series Traditionally Sold Well?

hello there lovely p politics from nintendo live here and john why have metroid games never really sold well do you want the definitive answer right now i want it from you and then i want the same answer but differently worded from xeon well you know what mine's gonna be a bit more in depth than that i think they can sell well and they have in the past so zeon you say things i'm pretty sure it's because they never released one on the wii u nintendo land doesn't count but if they would have put one on the wii u that could have completely changed the way we look at i'm i'm just kidding i'm i'm really excited to talk about this though yeah so basically um what we're going to be talking about today if you hadn't already gathered from the title and that very abrupt segway the metroid series as a whole has generally sold all right but it's never been one of nintendo's big mega hitters the metric that a lot of people throw around myself included is the animal crossing new horizons that one game the one game on the switch has outsold the entire metroid series over the course of its life which is frankly it's absolutely bonkers to think of it that way but that's how it be yes first party switch software sales are crazy right now i think newly from 3ds sold i think it was around 10 million it's around that mark but new horizons has tripled that it's over 30 million right now i think it's around 35 million so the switch is just this this hotbed for first party games so there's no doubt that metroid's going to do well but i do think in the past metroid hasn't exactly suffered that much i mean if you look at the gamecube for instance that wasn't one of nintendo's better performing consoles in fact the gamecube hardware is their second worst performing but on that system metro prime sold around let me just get the numbers the numbers mason so metro prime on gamecube sold 2.84 million units which is more than animal crossing it's more than mario party it's more than pokemon coliseum that's up there with luigi's mansion and it's not too far away from wind waker so i think given the opportunity metroid can do really well and i think you've tapped into the nub of my very argument because yes i think metroid has the potential and has always had the potential but it's always been released either at inopportune times or kind of in a weird way i know this sounds strange because they're nintendo systems but on the wrong console like the wii had a huge huge install base absolutely chuffing enormous and yet metroid prime 3 corruption only sold how many john i have the numbers i have the numbers so prime three corruption it's not the worst selling metro it's the fifth best-selling metroid and it's a 1.63 million units which is it is a decline from prime 1.63 million of anything except maybe bacteria is or atoms is a lot let's not beat around the bush that's a lot of games sold but we're comparing this to other nintendo first parties titles and the we sold how many units john according to nintendo the wii so 101.63 million units and in comparison the gamecube sold 21.74 so the wii is definitely much ahead but metroid prime still solved much better on gamecube and you know why that is why alex because the wiis were all owned by people's mums does grandma not want to play metro prime 3 corruption um no uh i did ask um but she wanted a cup of tea instead oh maybe other rem then his other meant to be some sort of play on mother yeah yeah it is that's stupid sorry let's not focus on other m although how many did that sell john uh over a million there aren't actual stats for other m but it definitely sold over a million that probably means nobody cares enough to keep track it did sit on the shelf long enough to seem like it didn't sell well or i think i picked up my copy new for a fiver i wouldn't be surprised a lot of metroid games do retain their value quite well but other ram just plummeted but um not very many metroid games have sold under a million and i know a million is hold to this standard of being just kind of the gateway to success well it's not really a million is quite a lot of sales like games like xenoblade chronicles 2 sold around 2 million uh arms uh sold on the high end of 2 million towards 3 million so like that that isn't a bad figure it's not like metroid has been suffering poorly over the years it's just that it's not mario and it's not zelda i don't want to be like singling zeon out um but it just so happens to zeon that you have not been as fervent a fan of metroid as i think john or myself and i'm not saying you know i'm not you know downplaying that or saying how dare you i just want to know because you are arguably the demographic but you haven't bought metroid uh i just want to know why that is yeah so i think i've been kind of waiting to bring this topic up because i just wanted to wait for a good moment and this seems this seems like the best but so i have bought a lot of metroid games over the years i did own metroid fusion i skipped zero mission i bought other m i don't remember if it was i don't think it was at launch but i bought that i bought prime three corruption granted it was pre-owned i never had prime one or two for some reason and and i had super metroid i don't know how i ever got it over the years but i had i've had all of those different games and i was trying to think of why you know why i fell off of them or why i just never stuck with the series and i think a big part of it for me is the accessibility and because in a lot of those games you'll get to a point you know you're constantly getting new power-ups and there's secret areas that you need to discover and it's it's a lot of i feel like the game involves a lot of trial and error and there are there are points in the game where you you know like in super metroid for me i i tried playing that game without a strategy guide and uh and i think i i could have done just fine but i put about 10 hours into the game and it and then i went to go look up i looked up a guide to see how far i was and i was about halfway through and people talk all the time about how you can like speed run those games and it's no no problem at all but for me i just often would get lost and i think i would get frustrated and i would move on to something else and you see series like super mario for example in or even just mario kart some of the newer entries we'll see accessibility is a huge thing for those games you'll add in there's invincibility modes or in mario kart you'll find where uh you can you can actually there's the steer assist mode so if you have like a three or four year old which i'm not trying to to compare myself to uh a child but you know you've already done it zeon you've already done it you're right but you know if you hand a controller to them they can still try to play the game and i feel like metroid you know i i don't think i don't think we should ever try to do that with metroid be able to hand i mean maybe yes be able to i would i would love to see a four-year-old pick up and play zero mission you know but but i think the thing is is that metroid hasn't had a lot of opportunities to innovate in that regard if so i've been playing samus returns recently i just beat zero mission uh like two weeks ago and so i'm playing samus returns and you find there's there's a ton of different accessibility options it feels like there's save points scattered all over the place you have a map on the bottom of the screen that you can always look at you have i i don't think this was a thing but in previous metroid games but correct me if i'm wrong there's the warp points where you can just hop around to any of the different warp you know nodes on the map or the teleportation areas and it's kind of new for 2d metroid yeah okay cool and and so it just you know that that's a big thing for me is because i would look at you know when i was playing old metroid games i would look at a spot on my map that i hadn't explored or even when i was playing zero mission and i would tell myself i don't want to go i don't want to go run all the way there to find out that there's either a nothing there or b maybe it's just a little missile upgrade and there's there's nothing else and it's on the completely other side of of the planet where now you have these warp areas that you can you can quickly go to and it and sure you're still going to put some effort into trying to get to that point but it doesn't feel like you're spending as much time or wasting the time so long story short for me you know i i didn't stick with the games just because i it i felt like i would get lost or frustrated very easily and yeah so i wonder if that has kind of pushed a lot of other people potentially off of the series not saying i i know there's there's merits to to you know that sort of immersiveness that that seclusion that you have when you play the games but uh but yeah i just feel like the franchise hasn't had a lot of opportunities to innovate on that that's interesting yeah i guess there's not that many chances over the years to do anything you are right though xeon samus returns has quite a lot of accessibility options um like for instance if you can't find where a metroid is you can just go back to the gate and it will tell you where it is so like that's optional you don't have to do that and it's something that fusion and xero mission both did like they both kind of guide you to where you're meant to go so i guess they're handheld games you know you don't want to put your console down and then not know where you're going but it's nice that they give you the option rather than just pinpointing exactly where you're meant to go that feels like a good step forward um and i guess in the indie scene as well we've seen a lot of metroidvanias over the years uh during metroid's lull like the last proper metroid if i i guess i guess other rim was 20 2011 2010 but prime 3 was 2007 and that was like the last proper you know open metroid game um in that time the indie scene has given us so many metroidvania we had like we had hollow knight we had cave story we had all these games that's all popped up and um gave their own spin on the metroidvania genre and a lot of them like hollow knight included are more popular than metroid has ever been by holland i know it's on multiple platforms i know it's on ps4 and switch and pc but it sold more than any metroid game and that's not that's not um a a backhand towards metroid as a franchise if anything that's showing that the interest for this genre has only grown during its absence i think it's definitely raised the bar though as well because hollow knight is very clever in its structure because one of the things you were saying that you know sort of like fusion and zero mission they tell you where to go and hollow knight does that at first i mean sort of it gives you um kind of like a bit of a semi-tutorial at first but then it kind of opens up and you can do the um the three things they're called um they're called dreamers the three dreamers they're the thing keeping the uh the egg closed and you want to open it for mad reasons uh good reasons actually but i don't want to get too much into it but you can do those in any order and it's not like it says or it like leans you in towards going one way you kind of naturally go in one direction a bit like breath of the wild breath of the wild kind of eases you towards zora's domain first but there's nothing stopping you from just ignoring everything that's being told to you and just you know going off to gerudo desert and just you know going and trying to take on nabooru and being completely completely and utterly unprepared for it and that is kind of echoed in hollow knight as well and that i think is a good balance between the two because metroid has done something similar like super metroid arguably has one of the best initial tutorials when it comes to the basic controls and structure because it literally gives you no um like actual worded instruction whatsoever but it teaches you everything it's been analyzed top to bottom by people far more um you know sort of in tune with game design than me but it's really good but that's when it ends and it opens up after only you know sort of 20 minutes tops you know more like 10 minutes i would say and that's where i think we could you know get that balance in there and some accessibility options would also be good however i feel we've slightly gone off time i mean it's somewhat related but at the same time it's not really talking about sales i i suppose some people might be put off like like zion was saying maybe it's too intimidating for them and they've tried a prior game they're like okay i'm not gonna buy this but um i definitely think that the genre has pushed ahead and samus returns has a lot of good accessibility options so i wouldn't fear that dread is gonna you know go back on that um and they even said in the treehouse like adam from fusion's back the big the big monitor thing and if you want to he will give you hints but it sounds like he won't be pointing you where to go so it's a nice balance yeah and that's the one thing that i've really been enjoying a lot is that is that i just have those options to fall back on if i do happen to get lost like last night i i just made it to the the fifth area in samus returns and i found an area where i need to use the i'm blanking on the term right now but the jump and it you turn into like a ball of lightning i should i should just know this screw it thank you yeah the screw deck i found i found a wall that i can't get through and i couldn't find any other area to go and i ran around for probably i probably only spent like 10 or 15 minutes on it but then i couldn't find you know i thought i thought i needed the screw attack and i thought i missed something and i was about to go backtrack through the area four or through other areas and then i ran around and used that ability that allows you to kind of find where there's walls that can be broken and i found a new little area that i was able to get through and now i'm and now i'm officially in area five but without that feature i might have gotten frustrated and just put the game down and i understand that's that's probably a more me problem than the game's fault but but i i think that you know just having those options is is going to cause a lot more people that maybe would not have played these games in the past to to try to get into them because you know we see things like when super mario 3d world i think released or 3d land maybe it was where you know if you die in a level too many times you you get the like super tanooki ability and you can basically blitz through a level i think most common players probably aren't going to use that ability or use it very infrequently but that could be a complete game changer for so many players and i feel like that that could directly affect sales maybe maybe not as much for some of us that that won't take advantage of those but for me in metroid it it's it's a game changer for me yeah i think the lull is going to do metroid a lot of good actually uh because in the mid 2000s there are a lot of metroid games but we had metroid fusion their metroid zero mission um also before that was prime then there's prime two there's prime hunters prime pinball prime three then other m there's a lot going on and i i love every entry in the prime series but i guess for your casual consumer maybe there's diminishing returns because they're all on you know fairly similar hardware uh and like from game to game it is a bit hard to just differentiate the difference if you're looking at a back of a box um and having this big gap from wii to switch with prime four that's gonna be a pretty drastic jump and also from from the game boy advance to the switch with with dread i think that this is probably gonna give the franchise a lot of energy that maybe it was kind of lacking when it was when it was in its uh i wouldn't say prime when it was it's probably say it i'm really curious to know do you either of you know what the sales were of samus returns on 3ds i'm trying to find it right now i never revealed them which is worrying sure yeah i mean it was a bad position though i mean samus returns had a lot of fanfare going for it like people were really excited for that game but it came out months after the switch when people weren't playing their 3ds and you know it was well received uh and speed running wise it's it's really popular like there's tons of speed runs for samus returns but it's just in that that that gap where there's like this warioware gold that samus returns there's that dylan game they're all good games but people just didn't want to play them on 3ds i think that's really that's really highlighting one of the biggest problems with the metroid series sales is that there's always there's never been like the right time to release a metroid game i don't think there's always been something there's always been something you know sort of like samus returns came out on the 3ds a hugely popular system but it came out after the successor came out it should have come out a year beforehand i think it probably would have done a lot better um i'm a sales expert as you know um as we mentioned earlier uh metroid prime 3 was released on a system with a huge install base but the install base was so so not interested in metroid um you know sort of naturally there were loads of wii owners who were and they bought the game but they are a very small fraction of the people who were who owned a wii and then with things like metroid prime metroid prime 2 the gamecube didn't sell well and it's just there's always a little caveat with pretty much every single um metroid release i mean if you go back to like super metroid and uh even the original metroid and metroid 2 you could argue that oh there's no excuse then but i do think that back then you know if you look at the numbers you have to take into account the fact that gaming was nowhere near as mainstream as it is now like the idea of video games video games are still seen as extremely extremely nerdy certainly i would say through the 90s they were starting to ease out but even so you know sort of it was not quite games workshop level but it was definitely seen as kind of like a specific interest it's worth pointing out too like when when metro debuted it it was a pretty huge success like metroid and nes sold um i think it's the second best selling game in the series around 2.7 million units and that's that's right behind punch out it's not too far behind games like excitebike and zelda 2 and dr mario but yeah i mean there's there's quite a lot of games in the metroid series when you think about it we're on our fifth of the main line there's three main line primes there's like three prime spin-offs it adds up to quite a bit and there have been many opportunities um over the years but only a few of them really stand out and metroid prime is the obvious one and it was the game it was one of the gamecube's headlining games we had mario sunshine we had wind waker we had metroid prime um and as we're saying earlier the gamecube as a console it's not actually that far from the wii u in terms of sales but the fact that metro prime was able to sell so well on quite a small install base just shows that the interest can be there if they are willing to give it that spotlight and i i maybe i'm just being hopeful but i kind of feel like the withdread it's kind of like it's all slotting into place you know the switch is a huge install base and they're interested in more of what we would i think as a group consider more traditional video game structure games rather than just dance um that's not ragging on just dance but it's definitely targeted towards a different demographic um so i think that metroid dread has the best chance that any metroid game has ever had to sell really well and i'll be really honest i kind of hope that it's going to double the sales of the previous best-selling metroid game which has fallen out of my brain at the so that was prime prime sold uh 2.82 million units so are you you're expecting well we're not expecting you hope that dread sells around over five million i reckon dread could do six maybe eight maybe more um i think it just has the potential it's got this you know metroidvanias as soon as you know sort of there may well be people looking at metroid dread for the you know seeing it and going oh metroid is that because it's a metroidvania and not realizing that metroid is where the genre comes from it may well be that there's you know that's probably only like if there's anyone like that it's only going to be a handful of people but even so i think that's entirely possible you know it's um phenomenon called the rice crispy effect i think it's you ask people what rice you ask people what rice krispies are made of what are they made of xeon um sugar i'm not sure are you being serious yeah i mean it's made of rice oh really rice krispies ah look at that i thought it was just straight candy i can't tell if i can't tell if you're pulling my leg no no i'm being honest i i wish i wasn't lying but you you just get full honesty for me yep that's the thing that it's proper nouns proper nouns you stop you stop you don't dissect them you know bran flakes are made of bran it's all cereal everything's cereal metroid dread is cereal metroid is made of rice um i want to go back to your cell's prediction alex because you you predicted that it sells around i think you started at five million you went all the way up to around 70. yes i would say my estimate is six plus i think we look at like prior games though clubhouse games was something i think many people underestimated it sold 3.14 million units clubhouse games uh and then we got remakes like the legend of zelda link's awakening a remake of a gameboy game sold 5.49 million and i realized zelda is hot right now but that is just showing us that these games which i think many would view as probably not on the same pillar as like a brand new like breath of the wild or something but they're still they're still selling crazy well um so that that kind of expectation for sales i don't think is unfounded another point that i wanted to bring up to that is that nintendo has always sort of i don't want to say they they always have but they've it feels like metroid has like you guys have sort of said metra has gotten the short end of the stick fairly often you know metroid prime did super well on gamecube for nintendo and lots of people loved it and then they when they released the ds they released it with the metroid prime hunters demo and you know so a lot of people that you know bought the ds for the first time if they for some reason didn't get a game with it or or something you know they were they were experiencing metroid and it was one of the the coolest little tech demos uh for for me back in the day you know i could run around and fight you know i could do like the level or i could run around and do some multiplayer and it was a lot of fun and it it gave a lot of people a good experience for uh or it allowed them to at least experience not not a traditional metroid game but but we got to find out kind of what metroid prime was about but then you know they go and release metroid prime 3 on the wii without having metroid 1 or 2 readily available and i could see that pushing back a lot of the the hardcore maybe not maybe the more casual like action orientated uh gamers you know on on the wii because peop a lot of people probably just wanted to play the first and second games and then they released the trilogy later which i think was a great move by nintendo to to package it all in one but i wonder how much that really saved the series at that point especially then when metroid other m came out and and it had so such poor reception you know it's uh it it feels like it just it can never win but now i i kind of agree with alex now and probably you john as well i feel like the series finally has a moment to shine it's had a nice a nice lull and uh and now you know now we can see what what the series can do again you touched on something quite interesting zeon i thought about this before in the past uh prime four which that's in development right now we don't know when it's coming i've always thought for one the logo looks weird the spacing of the logo is weird but also i don't think it needs to be called for uh i i think that's intimidating if anything but the prime trilogy it's story is told you know that that saga is done i think they can quite easily call it metroid prime subtitle i think that would help it rather than make it seem like you're something you have to be you know caught up with because you don't have to be now that story's done it's now about what's from what we know it's about psylux hunting samus or something but yeah i don't think you need to have that frau in the end metroid prime closed captions there you go that's the title metroid prime the hunted instead of instead of hunters and people be like i need to play hunters now metroid prime hunters too control samus using his stylus on the switch screen i i lowkey love um hunters i think there is so much untapped potential from like all the other bounty hunters they introduced there like really i know silex but i found silex to be one of the lesser of these one of the worst designs i i tweeted this the other day and people were angry there's psylux fans out there have you seen have you seen his design he's just a big hexagon purple hexagons are the best guns there are some cool designs in prime unders and i wish they went with someone else maybe they'll redesign them and make him look a bit cooler i don't know i i can't say that sonic's a bad design it's just i have others that i prefer like i think canden is the weakest personally it's a cobra man um but uh i think trace like the the the kraken the species that he is oh traces they've they've defined as one of the most hated and feared species in the galaxy they have an empire that spans you know solar systems it's like a rite of passage for a kraiken like you know sort of like a coming of age thing to conquer a planet like that's not a good race i want to see more of the kraken let's do it make it make a kraken spin off metroid prime um crying crap there you go bringing it back to sales a moment uh pikmin through the mugs sold 2.04 million units that's a lot that's pikmin pikmin never sells that much that's the best selling game in that series and if pitman can do that then metroid dread is at least guaranteed to you know be a success uh it's probably it's it's not it's not um optimistic to say it's going to be the best selling game in the series because it basically is going to be it's almost guaranteed so i have a question for you guys do you think that the that nintendo if they were to release the the past metroid games you know the past four in the in the series since metroid dread is being considered five do you think that would help or do you think it would hurt the series because and the reason i ask that is because you know someone like me might play up to metroid 3 and then i might go uh and then i might not be interested in dread anymore because i i didn't play you know one through one through four i think it would hurt it because at the moment metroid dread i mean we we call it metroid 5 but everyone else is just calling it metroid dread and rightfully so that's the main title of the game it's metroid dread i think they're avoiding calling it metroid 5 dread or whatever because they don't want to alienate people and i think generally the games have been pretty good at giving you the broad strokes of you know the situation you don't need to know that you know samus grew up on did she grow up on sr 388 or am i getting really confused she grew up um on zebus with uh the jozo um which was like um i think it's called bbl2 or something like that bacon lettuce tomato and then ridley killed everyone and then she grew up on zebus and she left her mark there i had no idea i genuinely thought but sr 388 was the home of the metroid's though isn't it yeah that's probably where i'm getting confused because she's gone metroid dna so i thought she came from no that's a whole other kettle of food mom and dad were both metroids it's a complicated story so what's the questions uh so my question was do you think that if nintendo were to release you know the classic games all of them on the switch and like one big package you know not not in sort of like a metroid prime trilogy fashion or you know maybe release them in through gba support on nintendo switch online do you think that would hurt the series more than it would help because we see a lot of people wanting to go back and play those games but i'm curious if if they would get their fill from that and then not venture forth into dreads historically this would i i'd like usually i'd say yeah hell yeah i'd put all the metroid games on switch but historically this has actually hindered a lot of releases i remember when um there's a sly cooper 4 that came out on ps3 and before that they had the sly cooper hd trilogy and that was a big success but m4 didn't sell that great then crash bandicoot had the crash bandicoot n sane trilogy and that was a huge success crash 4 moderate you know it was mid success so i i kind of feel like a lot of people like that they jump back into these classic collections and then don't come back for the next one i think if they released it after dread that would do quite well yeah however i would uh you know yeah i think i'll keep the momentum going i'll release dread this year and i think i would release a prime trilogy or a prime hd or something like that in the meantime to fill the gap till until four but i i i again i don't know if that would you know that would satisfy people enough to not come back for prime four though i did the definition of what you're talking about with the sly cooper thing i play i bought the collection i played one and two i started three and then i never bought thieves in time until i got it pre-owned years later so i'm i'm i'm sorry sly cooper i love you i didn't mean to hurt you poor sly it's a whole web of interesting and different ideas and things like that and i think we've raised some really good and interesting points but what do you think do you think do you have your own theories as to why the metroid series has historically not done as well as some of its compatriots let us know with a comment down below and all that's left for me to say is thank you so much for watching if you like this video why don't you lock onto that subscribe button and unleash it super missile at it and be sure to check out nintendolife.com for all sorts of lovely nintendo related content thank you again for watching bye by the end of the year dread will have sold 4.76 million units but there's still eager buyers waiting to purchase if i can beat metroid zero mission so can you inspiring words

Channel: Nintendo Life

Views: 97,726

Keywords: Nintendo Life, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Switch, NX, New 3DS, Nintendo UK, Zion, Alex, Jon, Metroid, Metroid Bread, Metroid Dread, Zero Mission, Wii U, Samus Returns, Low Sales, Popular, Rare, Hard to Find, Good, Bad, Thoughts, Opinions, Discussion, Chat, Metroid Switch, Metroid V, Metroid IV, Metroid Fusion, Metroid Prime, Metroid Collection

Id: -O20Rq32ILQ

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021