Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

And the real world war will invariably involve a nation that one of the fictional ones in Advance Wars is loosely based upon.

I think the games serve different purposes to some degree for Nintendo.

The main 2D adventure platformers are some of Nintendo's best known flagships. Mario Wonder sold twice what mario maker 2 did and is rank 12 top selling Switch game even though it came late in the generation. New Super mario bros U is rank 10 top selling. Mario Maker 2 is rank 24 at around 9 million sales (Nintendo stopped recording exact sales but we know from an infographic that they sold at least half a million after their officially recorded 8.5 million) which is still quite high, but certainly not as high.

But Mario maker is Nintendo's main maker game that isn't primarily about decoration like in Animal Crossing.

Also, Mario Maker is a very community driven game which is good free advertising for Nintendo — tons of streamers and YouTubers and such playing for years.

Between the above two features, I think the series probably helps push hardware sales more than one would think and it helps sell the mario brand in general; it's only personal experience, but I have known several people who watched some mario maker 2 gameplay and it made them want to play mario but they thought mario maker itself would be too hard or take too much time to make levels so they bought a traditional mario game (such as wonder) instead. Because Mario maker contains stuff from most of the 2D games, it's basically a 2D Mario nostalgia bomb.

Also, Mario Maker (after the initial idea) doesn't require the level of polish and new and creative ideas that a game like Wonder needs - fundamentally it is more about applying existing ideas into a solid framework and letting the players add the creativity. Which requires games like Wonder to exist first. So Nintendo doesn't have to 'use up' their new ideas on mario maker.

So basically I feel like the sub-series and 'main' 2D mario games strengthen each other while also targeting slightly different core audiences.

That said... I have zero clue which game will come out first though my personal guess is:

• 2027 - Mario Maker 3
• 2028 - New Super mario bros Wii port
• 2030 - whatever the sequel to wonder will be.

But obviously that could be super wrong. And I don't even believe my own prediction unless we get a new 3D mario soon because I think Switch 2 needs a fully mainline 2D or 3D mario early on.