EarthBound Series Sales Figures

Wow, impressive to see how EB sales are less than half of M2′s O_O

I was just thinking, you know how the word on the street is that Mother 1 was completely localized, and then just given the boot. They said they were going to ship it with a guide, and all kinds of fancy stuff. Did they ever do a full guide? I wonder if that exists in anyway whatsoever in the deep dark depths of Itoi’s basement.

I’m surprised Mother 2 sold less than any of the others in Japan. I mean, that’s the one we all know and love! And it turns out it’s the runt!

MOTHER 1+2 was probably runtier, it only got past 250,000 copies because Nintendo did a Value Selection re-release and kept it in stores for a few years longer.

That makes more sense. The only thing that surprised me was that 1+2 sold more than 2, because I’d read somewhere that it was the only one not to sell over 300,000.

OK, I broke up MOTHER 1+2 into the original release and then the re-release like 3 years later, I guess I should’ve done that originally rather than just add their figures together, heh.

Is that maybe a reason why they aren’t releasing M3 in US?

I can’t believe that EB only sold that much, a game does not have to sell a million to be succsessful, in fact, it should at least sell OVER 9000!! Well, anyways, EB didn’t sell well because for one thing, the people complained that the graphics “were inferior to Chrono Trigger” and “ALL RPGs HAVE to take place in a medievel setting, never a modern, feudal japaneeese, ancient egyptian, colonial america, wild western, prehistoric, or Sci-fi setting”

Anyhoo, Nintendo has been ignoring the Mother series and it’s fans for over a decade so that Nintendo can suport POKAYMON and it’s fans instead of all it’s other series, in fact, it (Pokemon) has even become more popular than Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog combined! Curse that electric rodent, CURSE YOU PIKACHU, CURSE YOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

COME ON NINTENDO, SUPORT THE MOTHER SERIES FOR ONCE INSTEAD OF YOUR ACURSED POKAYMON!!!!!

That’s pretty cool. I did a presentation on the series for English class last year, and I had sales figures for Mother 3 around 330k so yeah, that looks about right. I had figures for the Smash Bros series around 13.6 million, too. Good to get confirmation of those numbers from a much more reliable source, thanks!

I still keep the presentation loaded on my flash drive in case of emergencies. :3

EarthBound makes everybody so irritable for some reason…(GoldenEevee,Poe)…but anyway I’m really suprised that Mother 2 sold the least in Japan.

Oh, that interview’s really interesting; hadn’t seen that before. Definitely brings to light how much really got done with so few resources in those older translations; one guy and a month to translate all that text? And then make it fit? Yikes.

When you did the Mother 3 translation, did you have as strict a size limitation, or were you able to stretch that at all?

It was tough, and there was a definite space restriction (we would’ve had to cut all the text by about 1/2 or more), but I wasn’t happy with it so I made sure we hacked the game enough until we finally had the space we needed. In the professional world, you rarely have that luxury, and it’s not common for the translator to be on the programming team either

Does that mean that if the game were officially localized, they wouldn’t make room for the script and it would have to be abbreviated?

I don’t know, there’s no telling how it would’ve been handled. Reprogramming the game was horrible in so many ways, I wouldn’t even wish it upon anyone even if they had the source code. They probably would’ve done some level of compression though. But I don’t think they would’ve gone to the same lengths we did. They could’ve always taken out a lot of the unused stuff to make new room though.

I wrote about this once in a monstrous essay about why NoA does not have a personal grudge against the series. It compared EarthBound to other games of the time since some people seemed convinced that EarthBound sold “really well”. I couldn’t find many games with references about the number sold, so I didn’t much to go off. This is what I found:

Earthbound sold around 140,000 units for the time it was at retail stores.
Chrono Trigger sold 280,000 units, twice as much as Earthbound.
F-Zero X sold at least 383,642 units in North America and 97,684 units in Japan.
Final Fantasy III sold 520,000 units, almost quadruple the amount that Earthbound sold.
Kirby Super Star sold over 1 million copies in Japan.
Star Fox had 4 million units sold.
The biggest seller for the SNES, Super Mario World, sold 20 million units (it came bundled with the SNES)

Later era games:
Starfox 64 sold 300,000 cartridges within 5 days of release.
Pokemon Red sold 4.83 million and Blue sold 5.02 million.
Nintendo released Super Mario Bros again for the GBA as part of its 20th Anniversary with a special edition, which sold approximately 876,000 units.

I’d never known the statistics for Mother 1, 3, or 1+2, so this is a neat post. :]

I vaguely knew some of the numbers, but this really does drive the point. It wasn’t successful, however you slice it. It clearly wasn’t a flop, that’s pretty clear as well. But I can see why Nintendo are a bit dubious about release. There’s no guarantee it’ll be any more successful this time around, whatever the M3 patch figures say.

Which reminds me, what was that figure again?…

Another issue about releasing Mother 3 in the states is that it came out in Japan in 2006. 2006 was perilously far past the GBA’s prime as it was (the DS having launched in 2004), and the system certainly wasn’t going to get any younger during the localisation process. Yes, porting it would have been an option, but add the time (and expense!) of porting the game to the time and expense of localising it in the first place, and you have a pretty significant project on your hands… all for the sequel to a game that sold 140k copies.

It’s certainly easy to see why Nintendo wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to release Mother 3 stateside. In fact, I’m going to say that the late-lifecycle release is probably a big part of the reason, since the old Earthbound 64 got no small amount of mention in Nintendo Power prior to its difficulties, which certainly implies that Nintendo was keen to release it in North America at that time.

Darien: That may be true, but MOTHER 1+2 was released in 2003, when the GBA was still in its prime, yet Nintendo didn’t release that outside of Japan either. They even had the scripts of both games translated. I get the feeling that MOTHER 3′s timing wasn’t that big of a factor. It was a factor of course, but they probably wouldn’t have done anything with the game anyway, even if it had been released much earlier.

I think the fact of the matter is the Mother series is like an acquired taste. It doesn’t really appeal to the crowd, but for a smaller, hardcore group (that’s us ) it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. Mother 3 is easily one of my top 3 favorite games of all time, hands-down, and Earthbound in my top ten (I played Earthbound after I played Mother 3, so that might have made a difference in preference…)

I was playing Mother 3 (with the translation patch) in college one day and when my friends (who are mostly non-gamers or casual gamers) saw me playing Mother 3, they were wondering what the hell I was playing. I explained to them the gist of the game, the battle mechanics, the gripping, multi-faceted story and design, the brilliant writing (by that point more hardcore gamers had joined in to see what the fuss was all about). They weren’t impressed at all. They’d rather play cliche-ridden, soddily written, over-testosteroned games like Gears of War.

…

…

…I had a friend tell me that it didn’t have gamer rankings, achievements/trophies, or modern graphics…Which meant he will never play it.

(He’s an MGS fan.)

[...] 1995 with a huge and baffeling marketing campaign by Nintendo. Nintendo of America is devastated by EarthBound’s lack of sales. It is a bitter sting that still plagues the franchise in the minds of the powers that be in NOA to [...]

copb.phoenix, I’m an MGS fan. And I also love Earthbound. So to your friend, I give a rude raspberry noise -

*PPPBBBBTHHH!*

- for deciding that he’s too cool to play a game as wonderful as EB.

copb. pheonix: That guy is clearly a graphics freak, I can’t stand it when people only like the games for the graphics instead of gameplay or storyline, graphics are bullcrap. I don’t care if I’m playing an N64 or an NES game, I only play games for story and gameplay because those are the only this that really matter.

Good to know I’m not alone on that score.

wy cant they sell mother or earthbound in australia that sux

“…I had a friend tell me that it didn’t have gamer rankings, achievements/trophies, or modern graphics…Which meant he will never play it.”

Your “friend” is a plauge onto humanity and a failure at life.

Sorry, I know that’s harsh.

But it’s also true.

I think it’s important that he know, rather than delude himself into believing he is a worthwhile human being or, god-forbid, decides to ever convince himself he’s an decent or intelligent gamer in any regard, and then blab off that particular inaccuracy to anyone else.

It’s not like he can hope to save himself from any sort of actual embarrassment, but at the very least… maybe manage to mitigate the damage from shooting his mouth off, saying anything like that to another person.

[...] do that poorly. I’m not sure what the average sales number would be back in the SNES days, but is 140,000 really so terrible that Nintendo refuses to test the waters again? Compared to Japan’s lifetime [...]

to mato : not to get of topic but the Paul McCartney
dead cenpericey is vagly reladid to that sean thet everdead is fond fantind in forside

Outside of emulators I’ve never played Earhtbound because I’m from England. I feel Nintendo should really rerelease or remake the mother games over here. Despite many people claiming how desperately they would like to have it rereleased here, they always seem to ignore it. If they are reluctant because of the poor Earthbound US sales, they probably shouldn’t worry. European gamers tastes are generally similar to Japanese gamers.

Fans in 1995 – 1996

140,000

Fans in 2011

Millions

Reggie’s Reply: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *dies*

(@ninten LOL)…
japan has it all
earthbound cons
mother3 is normal
its not FAIR! … *sobs*

So by my calculations, NOA made about 9,000,000 from EarthBound, and spent about 2,000,000 on its localization, and the majority of that 2,000,000 went into advertising. So at least the game wasn’t a flop.