Look, I’m sure we all expected Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to do reasonably well, given that it’s Mario Kart, and those always end up selling well. But, given that this one is just a remaster of a three year old game being sold at full price, and a remaster of a game that already sold over 8 million copies, I’m sure no one expected it to sell as well as it has been, breaking records and topping charts worldwide.
Apparently, one of the people who were taken aback and caught off guard by the game’s success was Jefferies Equity analyst Atul Goyal, who noted that the game is a hit on a level beyond any imagined. “No, this is not just any ordinary success,” he said. “The scale of this success is many times bigger than what is visible with “MK8D sales of 459K units exceeded MKWii sales of 405K”. Analyzing the scale, we realize that like-for-like, MK8D is mega-hit on a different scale altogether (maybe 5-10x better). On the launch day in the US, MK8D sold approximately 459K units. By 31 Mar’17, Switch had an installed base of roughly 1.2m in ‘The Americas’ (and probably 1.5m by Apr-end). The earlier launch day record was earlier held by Mario Kart Wii (launched in Apr 2008). Recall that Mario Kart Wii was launched 17 months after Wii launch (Nov-2006). By 31 Mar’08, Wii had a global installed base of 24.45m (Switch was at roughly 2.74m by ’17 Mar-end) and its installed base in The Americas was 10.6m (Switch was 1.2m).”
The success of the game is truly astounding- but it does make sense when you consider that most people not only skipped the Wii U, they didn’t even know that it existed in the first place. To the bulk of the people who played Mario Kart Wii, which sold 37 million units worldwide, this is the first console Mario Kart game in almost a decade- and now, we are seeing sales justifying that.
[via Yahoo Finance]
