New Super Mario Bros. Puts Galaxy in World 1-2
posted Saturday Jan 23, 2010 by Josh Henry
The New (if you can call him that) Mario is ground-pounding his galaxy-venturing counterpart into another universe, with sales of New Super Mario Bros. Wii having already eclipsed Super Mario Galaxy in the US. According to the NPD, Galaxy has sold approximately 4.1 million units in the two years since its November 2007 release, while NSMBW has sold 4.2 million sales in about 45 days! For those of you that are number crunchers, if the game kept selling at this pace it would sell at least 10 million copies by the end of this year!
According to IGN, the Wii's install base is much higher now (26 million in the US), but that still doesn't explain why Galaxy, which has 16 times the amount of time that NSMBW has had on shelves, was passed by so quickly. I think the reason for NSMBW's success is simply because they further perfected the formula that is the Mario side-scroller, while also getting some of the older Super Mario franchise fans to try out the new, shiny version. Will Super Mario Galaxy 2 be just as successful? Or will the mountain that NSMBW is be too hard for it to conquer? We shall see, because after all, Super Mario Galaxy has a fan base after its original release. Maybe that will give it the boost it needs to put up some serious numbers.
