Metroid Prime Remastered

With Metroid Prime Switch being strongly confirmed for holiday 2022 by industry insider Jeff Grubb, a few questions remain. When will it release? Will it be full price? and How many copies can it sell?

When

The when seems to be the easiest to figure out. Metroid Dread released late October, which is always a good time for creepy, atmospheric games to release and found strong success for a 2D Metroid and even went on the become the best selling game in the series thanks to the install base of the Nintendo Switch with 2.9 million in sales at the end of FY22.

Nintendo’s big holiday release for 2022 seems to be Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, which is coming out on November 18, 2022 and you don’t want to cannibalize your own sales so a late October release date seems to make the most sense again.

Price

There is no reason to assume that Metroid Prime Remaster will be anything less than full price. When it comes to ports and remasters, Nintendo usually doesn’t go too far above and beyond. When looking at the companies history of rereleases on the Switch, most have been full price with few exceptions. Links Awakening, Pikmin 3 Deluxe, DK Tropical Freeze, Super Mario 3D World, Captain Toad, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the list goes on. All of these games were the same, full price of their original release.

Even though the trilogy was already released on the Wii for the price of one game, Nintendo's recent history doesn’t lead to many outcomes where Metroid Prime Swtich will be less than full price.

Sales

The reason it will be full price is because Nintendo understands their demographic, which is likely still very similar to how it looked in 2002 when Metroid Prime released. Still a certain age group, meaning that many haven’t experienced this game at all, still interested in first person and still interested in science fiction. Metroid Prime checks all the boxes.

To try to predict potential sales figures for Metroid Prime Switch we would take the GameCube sales of 21.74 million and then the total sales of Metroid Prime, which are estimated at 2.84 which works out to 13 percent. Now if we take that number and extrapolate it to Swtich total sales then that would mean potential sales for Metroid Prime Swtich would be 14.3 million with total Swtich sales floating around 110 million right now.

Understandably, these numbers seem high for a series that has never eclipsed three million but the best selling game in the series is Metroid Dread with 2.9 as of their last earnings report and that was a 2D game. If you assume that Nintendo’s fanbase still loves sci-fi and still loves first person, these numbers seem highly attainable, especially if they do any type of celebration for the 20 year anniversary of the game.