Talking about sales is kind of boring for most people, but having this data is invaluable to understand the creative and business decisions of the actors in the game industry. And having not just the total sales, but the regional breakdown is useful too - Japanese developers are notorious for not giving the time of the day for series that are global sellers but have little domestic success.
Unfortunately because of the cloak and daggger bullshit of the video game industry, it's
very hard to find reliable sales data, leading people to quote the (worse-than-useless) vgChartz or simply spew complete bullshit. But with a little luck and a *lot* of pointless sleuthing, I've been able to find hard data regarding the sales of Wario games, and since I have it, why not set the record straight?
-The main organism for getting US sales data, the NPD, used to be very detailled during the Xbox/PS2/GB era, giving the top 150 for each system, the exact sales and even revenues for each title, but it drastically scaled back the data available at the start of the next generation. Now it doesn't even give sales data to non-subscribers beside vague milestones, and a subscription cost in the five digits.
-Finding European sales data is almost *impossible*. The closest European equivalent to NPD, Chart-Track never gave sales number, only positions.
-Japan is the last bastion for detailled public sales. Famitsu/Enterbrain publishes detailled top 20 data each week since 1995 and another organisation called Media Create does the same (or rather did; by late 2018, they started only posting the top 10 and dropping numbers). All of the Japanese data is from Famitsu unless said otherwise.
-Snapped!, DIY Showcase, Bird and Beans and Paper Airplane are excluded from the following because of their digital-only nature. The only way I could get data for those games is if a Nintendo employee gave them to me.
-Finding data for VB WL is hard due to the Virtual Boy's very low volumes.
-There is a distinction between "shipped" and "sold". Shipped means the copies were sold to the retaillers - video game publishers get money from this transaction but they obviously want the game to sold directly to consumers too so that retaillers order more copies, and don't get burned and refused to order more of your next game.
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This blog post by French video game journalist and sales expert Oscar Lemaire was a very useful starting point in getting the Japanese data for Wario games.
Now, them sales...
WarioWare Get It Together (since I assume most people are interested in reading about the newest game first first)
-Anecdotally the game seems to have fairly low launch stocks and is not meeting demands. Multiple people reported the game selling out at specialized retaillers or gamestop reps telling them that they only had preordered copies in stock.
-The game
launched #1 in the UK boxed charts, though it was noted that the game "did not need to sell a lot to get to the top" and "Its boxed launch sales are below that of Miitopia". For week 2, it dropped to 8th place, and week 3, it was 10th.
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Sold 72,277 in Japan at launch, being the highest launch for a Wario game since Wario Master of Disguise. It has sold a total of 126.317 as of September 26.
-Launched at #3 weekly sales in France and Switzerland, 9th in Australia, 5th in Italy, #1 in South Korea. no numbers. Remained #3 in France for its 2nd week. Launched at #4 in Taiwan and remained in that spot the next week.
-Was 2nd on its launch week in Spain,
with a little over 4k copies sold.
Games that shipped over a million copy
(re regional breakdowns: US sales are NPD unless otherwise noted; I got the numbers from an old Nintendo World Report forum thread that reported NPD sales data. Japanese sales data is from Famitsu unless otherwise noted)
Nintendo actually provides on its quarterly reports whenever a game ships over one million copies worldwide. A NeoGaf user found Nintendo has PDF listing all million-selling first-party games and made a thread about it. I'm not going to repost the PDFs since you can just go there, but I'll recopy the data relevant to the Wario games.
(none of the following include sales of download copies)
Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land
-Shipped 5.10 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling Wario game and the 10th best-selling (first party?) Game Boy game
-Sold 1.59 million copies in Japan alone according to an old Tokyo Game Show slide, making it the best-selling Wario game in Japan
Wario Land 2
-Shipped 1.46 million copies worldwide
-Sold 260 733 copies in Japan
Wario Land 3
-Shipped 2.20 million copies worldwide
-Sold 254 968 in Japan
Wario Land 4
-Shipped 2.20 million copies worldwide
-Sold 484 591 in Japan
-Sold 719,055 in the US
Wario Land: Shake It
-Shipped 1.06 million worldwide
-Sold 114 263 in Japan
Wario Ware
-Shipped 1.10 million worldwide
-Sold 622 898 in Japan
-Sold 245,572 in the US
WarioWare Touched
-Shipped 2,47 million worldwide
-Sold 1 136 255 in Japan, making it the best-selling WW there and the 2nd best-selling Wario game in Japan after the original WL.
-Sold 332,334 by the third semester of 2005 in the US (figures from https://www.nintendojo.fr/public/v6/images/nouvelles/2005/11/charts-3eme-trimestre-2005.pdf), making it the #3rd best-selling Nintendo DS game by that time.
WarioWare Smooth Moves
-Shipped 2.36 million worldwide
-Sold 658 422 in Japan
-Quoteth Wikipedia: "The game received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[33] indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom. "
Games that did not break the million barrier
Now this is getting interesting. All of these games did not ship a combined amount of one million worldwide, so they were not included in the above PDFs. NA and Japan sales data is still available for most of these games.
Wario World
-Sold 142 618 in Japan
-Sold 290k in the US by 2007, making it the 98th best-selling GC game in the US.
-Couldn't find hard numbers for Europe, but an
old UK sales report stated that
"the sales of [...] Wario World [...] could be considered disastrous."
WarioWare Mega Party Games
-Sold 400 785 in Japan
-Sold 136,825 in the US
WarioWare Twisted
-Sold 463 938 in Japan
-Sold 114,195 in the US (According to Oscar Lemaire in the above-linked blog post, it had sold less than a thousand in its opening month. That's some pretty good legs...)
Master of Disguise
-Sold 289 872 in Japan
WarioWare Do It Yourself
-Sold 187 404 in Japan
-launched #30 in the UK and didn't appear to stay on the charts (DS Archives - Page 391 of 862 - Nintendo Everything )
- I don't have US sales data but it's likely the game did not sell well as it was quickly and massively discounted. A few years back, whee Super Mario 64 DS still sold for $40 new, DIY was sold $5 new at Best Buy (mind you, this was before the NWN shutdown)
Game & Wario
-Sold 63 567 total in Japan according to Famitsu by the end of 2013, and 80k lifetime. Media Create has it at 70k.
-According to the NeoGaf "leaker" Creamsugar (who had a NPD subscription or something), the game had sold 36k in its first two months in the US.
-The game did not make the Top 40 in the UK when it launched- if you removed games in console bundles and bundled with accessories, it was #40. There's a distinct chance Game & Wario sold less than one thousand in the UK.
WarioWare Gold
-Launched at the #39 spot in the UK: dropped off the charts the next week...
until January 2020 where it reached the 6th spot, entirely on account of UK retailler Argos clearing its 3DS stock for 6 euros (still worth noting it was the highest 3DS game on the chart). The week of Janaury 26 it was
18th
-Sold 1.700 copies in Spain by week 33
(source)
-Launched with 31.018 units sold in Japan. Sold 127.666/142.896 (media create, 2018/2019), 132.570 (Famitsu), or 138,024 units (Dengeki Online) by the end of 2018. It was the 2nd best-selling game of August according to Famitsu . It was also the 2nd most downloaded game on the eshop for its first three weeks. While this seems like a low total,
it compares well to other 3DS games released at the time.
-Was the third best-selling 3DS game for the month of July according to NPD tracking (the tracking period ended August 4- the game launched August 3, so that's two days worth of sale. Also note that NPD does not include digital sales for Nintendo games). It did not make the top 20. For the August tracking period it was #2nd for 3DS but still not in the top 20, and was the #8th 3DS game for September.
According to neogaf/Resetera insider (?) "Chris1964", it sold in the 40k-45k range from launch to early September. It did not make the Top 10 best-selling 3DS games for 2018 according to NPD.
--Digitally, it was #1 on week 1, #2 on week 2, #8 on week 3 (
3DS eShop charts (8/8/18) - Nintendo Everything (1 on the chart)
3DS eShop charts (8/15/18) - Nintendo Everything (2 on the chart)
3DS eShop charts (8/22/18) - Nintendo Everything
So there you have it. If anyone reading this has data that's not listed above, I'd love to hear from you.
www.famitsu.com
