Mario Strikers Battle League Sales (Should Next Level Have made Luigi's Mansion 4?)
Mario Strikers Battle League Sales
With NPD reports and official earnings reports from Nintendo for Q1 FY23 we now have some sales data for Mario Strikers Battle League but some of these figures got me wondering if Next Level Games should’ve made Luigi’s Mansion 4 instead? Lets take a look at some critical and commercial data to get a better idea.
Q2 FY 2023 UPDATE AT THE END OF ARTICLE
Commercial
On the commercial side of things, Luigi’s Mansion 3 was also the third best selling game for the month when it was released back in October of 2019. However, there is one massive difference: Luigi’s Mansion 3 was released on October 31, which means that it placed third for the month with just one day of sales accounted for. It also placed third behind brand new releases that included Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019, and The Outer Worlds.
The amount of Switch owners was also much less back in October of 2019, somewhere in the area of 40-50 million users less making the release and placement of Luigi’s Mansion at the third spot all that more impressive. As of March 31, 2022, Luigi’s Mansion 3 has sold 11.43 million units. During its first quarter, Luigi’s Mansion 3 sold 5.37 million units during its first two months available.
Mario Strikers Battle League on the other hand released on June 10 meaning that it had 2/3 of the month to accumulate sales and there were no other new releases in the top ten to make competition harder.
Officially from Nintendo, Mario Strikers Battle League sold 1.91 million, which isn’t great but is only for around three weeks of sales. The more concerning factor is that when discussing the new first party titles released in the quarter, Nintendo only mentioned that Nintendo Swtich Sports was selling well, remaining stable and they expect it to sustain sales pace.
Critical
When looking critically at these two titles, Mario Strikers Battle League has a 73 review average and that is unlikely to change since majority of the reviews would have come in by now. Luigis Mansion 3 has a review average of 86.
Historically most Mario Strikers titles haven’t performed overly well commercially or critically but that isn’t the case for Luigis Mansion. The Luigi Mansion series has seen its quality rise over the years with the first game at 78, Dark Moon at an 86 and Luigi’s Mansion 3 also at 86 for a series average of 83.3.
Super Mario Strikers has a 76, Mario Strikers Charged has a 79, and Battle League has a 73 for a series average of 76.
The direct comparable for Mario Strikers Battle League is Mario Golf Super Rush, which is another Mario sports title that has found cult success over the years but always lacked strong critical and commercial success. Mario Golf Super Rush released on June 25, 2021, scored a 70 average, and sold 1.34 million during its first earnings report, which consisted of about a week.
In the following full quarter it sold another 600k, and another 320k the following quarter and finally another 90k in final quarter of FY22 for a total of 2.35 million units sold. They might seem similar but Mario Golf Super Rush was selling at an average of 200k per day in its first quarter of release, whereas Mario Strikers Battle League is only selling around 90k per day.
With all of this information, it would certainly seem that another entry in the Luigi’s Mansion series would have been the more financially wise decision.
UPDATE Q2 FY23 Report
Mario Strikers Battle League now has reported sales of 2.17 million, which means that after its initial sales of 1.91 in its first three weeks, Mario Strikers has sold 260k copies in the three months following, which has to be very disappointing internally. There might some hope for Mario Strikers with the 2022 World Cup taking place in November might give sales a slight boost from its 2900 copies per day that it is currently selling on average.