The Top Ten Best-Selling Games For Wii U, 3DS, Wii And DS (As Of September 2021)

Of course Mario Kart had to make an appearance on all of these lists. Sometimes, I don't understand its success.

My Wii U still gets a ton of play and I’m still adding games to it and my Wii that I missed out on. I recently picked up Bwii2 (Battalion Wars 2) great game.

-All Wii U except Mario Party 10.

-All 3DS except Pokemon X (but not Y), Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon

-All Wii except Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus, and Wii Party

-And a few from DS (New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart DS, Brain Training, and SM64DS)

In terms of actually playing them instead of just owning, I have played all the Wii and Wii U games I own, but 3DS I picked up quite a few as a result of clearance sales (e.g Pokemon and Tomodachi Life). 3DS had a really good library, but I feel the Top 10 doesn't really reflect that. DS also has a similar problem. 3DS is also the one console where I played through a Pokemon game (Y), which is the only one I have played thus far as I don't feel a desire to return to it. At least I have the 3000 years meme.

Well, i have :
1. GBA (software only, played on NDS lite)
2. NDS (NDS Lite)
3. 3DS (4 machines: 2 USA, 1 Japan, 1 Europe)
4. Gamecube (software only, played on Wii)
5. Wii (Wii USA RVL-001)
6. Wii U (Black 32 GB Mario Kart 8 Bundle)
7. Switch (PAL machine, Neon Red Blue bundle)

I still think that with the Wii, Sports should not be counted as it was a packed in game, and I'm not sure you could buy it separately either (dont quote me on that one)

a lot of pokemon games here, which was unexpected ngl

None on the Wii U list since I don't have one and none on the NDS one since I continue to rely mostly on the flash card and romset for it... unless we count SM3DAS in place of a 64 DS purchase, but the latter seems too standalone for this approach. Similarly, the only Wii game I can nominally claim here is Super Mario Galaxy courtesy of the same old SM3DAS... at least in this case the versions appear mostly identical.

3DS? A whole six items out of ten! 😎 Although three of these I got "bundled" with the used console itself.😅

I have 9 of the top 10 Wii U games, 7 of the top 10 3DS games, 8 of the top Wii games and 7 of the top DS games. Not bad.

Wait brain training??

why

I own all the Wii U games and all the DS games.
I have a Brand new Blue DS Phat CIB unopened as I bought a few cheap when 3DS came out.
I also have all those Wii games.
I have 80+games for my Wii U and I bought the Xenoblade Wii U Limited Edition console cheap when Switch came out
Still have it brand new in its box.

@Dethmunk A sequel to Zombie-U would make much more sense in VR. I guess The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is basically that though.

I had 9/10 Switch games missing Sword/Shield
9/10 Wii U missing Luigi U
7/10 3DS missing X/Y, OR/AS, and US/UM
7/10 Wii missing New Mario Bros, Smash Brawl, and Galaxy (though I've got it with 3D All Stars now)
and finally 6/10 DS missing all the Pokemon and Mario 64 DS

None of the Wii U games as I honestly skipped it but pretty much most of the rest of the games except the brain training games and Animal crossing ones, oh and Wii Play and Party.

Haha, wow my handheld gaming tastes are very different than most people's.

Own all of them except NSMB wii.

Short answer: 34, at least owned at some point.

Kind of surprised, I thought I skipped many of the most popular picks often. Then again, that was a different time, and this is a great reminder of how I used to buy all of the games I was even remotely interested in, even if it was just to have them in my collection. Now I just get what I really want to play, often when prices have dropped significantly.

I have all of them except the Wii Fits, Nintendogs, AC:WW, and one of the Brain Ages.

@vanillasundae_ Is this a joke?

I have:

8 of 10 for the Wii U. I don't have Smash or Nintendo Land.

9 of 10 for the 3DS. The only one I don't have is Smash.

4 (or 3 if you don't count Wii Sports) of 10 for Wii. I have Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros Wii and Super Mario Galaxy.

6 of 10 for DS. I don't own either Brain Training game, Smash, Diamond and Pearl (I got back into Pokemon with Platinum after not playing since Yellow, but that doesn't count for this), or Animal Crossing.

As you can tell, I never had a thing for Smash. I've tried a few different versions of it and just never cared for it. I have a decent amount of Wii games (between 30 and 40 it looks like...yes there are that many that aren't shovelware)...looking at them I'm sad Punch Out isn't on the list. It looks like my buying habits haven't really changed as we go on the Switch, I have 6 of the 10 of those.

7/10 on WiiU, 7/10 3DS, 9/10 Wii, 8/10 DS. Not a bad collection

Wow, people really love Mario Kart! Looking at these figures I guess I can see why Nintendo often sticks to its tried and true franchises rather than taking a chance on some of its other interesting IPs, which is a bit of a shame to me.

@ModdedInkling Why? Mario Kart is fun. That's pretty much it.

Anyone else notice that Nintendogs outsold Mario Kart and Pokémon on DS? That blew my mind

@RandomNerds same! Just finally beat Shovel Knight on it a week ago. Nearly have a full NA set because I'm a sick man, a sick, sick man

And we have owned every single one of those for each console in our household. Great memories of gaming there.

Eight on Wii U, one on 3DS, four on Wii, none on DS.

Owned 10/10 wii u. Owned 6/10 3ds (and don’t know how LBW and KI:U didn’t sell more). 8/10 Wii (No party or Fit+ for me). And only 4/10 ds (Jump Ultimate Stars didn’t make it? …yeah, okay, I understand that).

@Savino yes. But you know most people buy nintendo for their exclusive first party titles.

@Savino,

I think the Switch is still showing that most people buy Nintendo games on Nintendo consoles, doubt it will change anytime soon.

As of September 30th 2021

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — 38.74 million
Animal Crossing: New Horizons — 34.95 million
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate — 25.71 million
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — 24.13 million
Pokemon Sword/Shield — 22.64 million
Super Mario Odyssey — 21.95 million
Super Mario Party — 16.48 million
Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu/Let's Go Eevee — 13.83 million
Splatoon 2 — 12.68 million
Ring Fit Adventure — 12.21 million

I did NOT expect ACWW to be in the DS's top ten!

I guess I underestimated how many people played that game.

@Savino To be fair since the N64 support has been so sporadic that non-Nintendo games have inconsistent releases on Nintendo hardware. When many things showed there could have been strong 3rd party sales.

When The FF3 and FF4 remakes on DS selling 2 million, FFTA selling 2 million on GBA as rather minor releases.

Kind of pointed towards a missed opportunity that a major mainline FF on Nintendo Post SNES could have been big.

I'm surprised Tomodachi Life on the 3DS is a top seller. I really need to play it.

Biggest shocker to me is that Smash Bros on the 3DS outsold its WiiU counterpart by almost 2:1. I realize the two had very different install bases. Still, no one ever thinks of Smash Bros. as a portable gaming experience.

@HammerGalladeBro
That is the one game on that list that I don't own or have access to (meaning that my son was the Pokemon player in the family and has those games).

The combination of Wii/DS then WiiU/3DS were the most played consoles and games for me. Had at least 5/10 on all 4 of those (all 10 on WiiU) and have only 2/10 on switch

@ModdedInkling I know right? Without a deeper analysis one would think mainline 3D Mario titles would dominate or at least be nearer the top.

I suppose casual players don’t like core games, but core players like casual games.

You should put amount of consoles sold too, so that we can see the attach rates

@BTB20
I only hate it because it gets repetitive. I never find that much of replay value and playing it with friends is generally very obnoxious.

@BlubberWhale
Yeah, that seems to be how the demographics generally line up. I just wish those casual gamers expand their horizons and try out the games we've played.

Everything tho not a Pokémon fan so missing on 3ds. Pokémon x and y

@ModdedInkling For real. They don’t know the joy they’re missing. (Barely even an exaggeration.)

I’m currently trying to introduce a female friend to games by getting her to be Gooigi in LM3. (Unfortunately I underestimated the time it would take to get that item, and she basically watched me play for an hour and then had to go home right before she was able to join... she’ll probably give it another go though, so we’ll see what happens heh.)

I'd kill for Switch successors to Tomodachi Life and Wii Sports Resort. And based on those numbers, plenty of others would, too!

@Savino this is only counting Nintendo published games anyway.

@Bret no it's not, i forgot how well pokemon sold

@ModdedInkling Because it's fun!

I believe I have ALL the 3DS titles mentioned.

I miss my Wii U

I'm surprised, but I actually got all the Wii U titles except the Zelda game.

Only a few of the Wii titles. Not really into the Pokemon games.

For Game Cube, I sold off all the games that I picked up for cheap that we just never got into playing, just keeping the classics RE: Mario Kart, Smash, Pikmin 2, Sunshine and Racing Revolution. (But picked up 50th Namco and Midway Arcade Anthology just to round out the games.)

And . . . I actually went and got a Nintendo 2DS after we got our Switch just to get Zelda OOT and MM to play on the go. LOL. That and Super Mario 64 DS. This was before N64 NSO came out. But even now, I leave the Switch for my kids to play, so its nice to have the 2DS as an alternative. For the 2DS, I actually found a copy of the Super Mario 3D Land and played through that, and picked up Ultimate NES Remix as well. LOL.

@vanillasundae_ It's the single biggest media franchise on the planet

Notice that basically all top 10 games for every system are Nintendo IPs.

The only thing I found shocking on these lists was Mario games on Wii. New Super Mario Brothers outsold Galaxy by more than two to one?! I thought Galaxy would have far outsold a 2D retro Mario.

@johnvboy @Rpg-lover @Savino You do realize Nintendo does not report sales of games that aren't published by them, right?

@Dr_Lugae The DS and Wii saw a ton of games and many of them became million sellers.

Here's a link showing that generally most games sold on Nintendo consoles are third-party:
https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/threads/nintendo-software-and-hardware-sales-data-from-1983-to-present.170/

@Dog,

I do, so I check the general Switch list updated on Wikipedia, most of the third party stuff rarely breaks a million sales.

@Bunkerneath I bought mine separatly for my wii u