Topic: Mario to Reach 1 Billion Software Units Sold on Switch 2?

According to https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo Mario (combination of Mario Kart, Party, Super Mario etc) has sold 826m units of software. This may not be completely up to date, so may be closer to 830m.

Could Mario reach 1bn (so around 170m more) units sold on Switch 2? a new Mario Kart could be 50m? a new 3D Mario 30m? You could easily see Mario selling over 100m games on Switch 2, is 170m a bit too far?

My numbers may be wrong, wikipedia says Mario has sold 879m copies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...

One of the two lists may be out of date but there are also all sorts of edge cases which could lead to different numbers depending on how you count. Do you count Luigi's mansion and Captain Toad and Peach Showtime? How about all Donkey Kong games?? How about Mario Teaches typing which apparently sold almost a million copies? Both lists probably made different decisions.

It is an interesting question of how Nintendo counts this type of thing if they bother to. They occasionally give us numbers such as 'total 2D mario platformer sales on Switch' but I've never seen them combine all related franchises.

@FishyS The footnotes on the Wikipedia list say it does include the Mario spin-offs based on other characters (including Donkey Kong) whereas the other wiki doesn't, so you're right that's probably the main reason for the discrepancy. There's also the fact that these numbers are kind of cobbled together from whatever sales figures are available, which are not always kept up to date or inclusive of all regions. Wikipedia does at least cite its sources for most of these so it's probably about as accurate as you're going to get, but there's a few figures in there that I doubt are fully comprehensive. E.g. it says the Mario DDR game on GameCube sold exactly 59,922 copies and there's no source listed for that - I'm sure the game wasn't a smash hit and it won't really affect the overall total, but it must have sold more than that, right?

@Dogorilla If one of those lists included Donkey Kong games and one didn't, that's probably the majority
of difference in the numbers but there are definitely a lot of other cases that are hard or impossible to track down precisely.

On a different site I saw 470,000 listed for mario DDR. It was just adding up regional reported sales so I suspect Nintendo itself never reported anything or maybe only something silly like day-1 numbers.

Things have been reported differently over time but let's think of what gets reported now.

Official quarterly Nintendo reports sale figures (including digital) for:

• games which sold 1 million + that fiscal year
• games on the top 10 lifetime best selling list for Switch
• occasionally something else specific about a random game but not often
• occasionally indirect information — e.g. last year's rounded number of total 2D mario sales on Switch logically implies Mario Maker 2 has sold something like a million higher than the official tally but it's anyone's guess what the precise number is.

Meanwhile we also have:

• Physical-only sales for certain but not all regions reported if a game ends up as one of the most sold games for a week or month, depending on region. Note that in Wikipedia these don't always get added to the prior Nintendo reports because who wants to do math (or reference like 40 sales reports over time)?
• Other sporadic data available from physical game-sellers which generally doesn't get reported on.
• Some Nintendo partners may choose to declare total sales for games like e.g. Mario Rabbids if they feel like it.

Because of this and the fact that Nintendo says more than half of their sales are digital, we may never see the majority of sales for low-performers like Emio. Mario games usually cross the million-sale threshold but for games sold right before the end of the fiscal year (e.g. Peach Showtime, Mario vs Donkey Kong) we only see the very first sales — if they almost doubled in sales with 900,000 more the next fiscal year we might never know.

Of course for much older historical data it's even more confusing since different things got reported at different times.

I suspect that total Mario sales is a bit closer to 1 billion than you think, although counting e.g. Donkey Kong Country is questionable.

First franchise to sell 1 Marillion copies?

@FishyS I forgot about digital sales not being counted - it probably wouldn't be too far off a billion if they were, especially if you include Virtual Console. As for whether the franchise will hit a billion actually recorded sales... it could be doable if Mario Kart 9 is as big as 8 Deluxe. But that would depend on the Switch 2's sales being in a similar league to Switch 1's, and I'm not sure the S2 will do quite that well. But we'll see!

Counting Donkey Kong's games as part of the Mario franchise is a bit of a thorny topic. Mario doesn't really have anything to do with those games, but on the other hand DK appears in most of the multiplayer Mario spin-offs, and of course both characters originated in the same game. You could reasonably say the entire Mario franchise is a Donkey Kong spin-off.