Nintendo just shared their latest financial reports, and perhaps one of the biggest stories is actually about something that’s missing. We didn’t receive any word on Metroid Prime 4, but with Nintendo almost always reporting when a game crosses a million sales, this implies that it hasn’t sold a million units yet on either platform. Whilst there is a little more to the story than this, it’s hard to deny that the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 is having a rough start on the market.
Specifically, Nintendo reports when a game sells over a million copies on one specific platform only, not cross-platform. As such, it’s possible that combined sales across the Switch and Switch 2 Edition of Metroid Prime 4 might be way past a million sold. Regardless, that’s still a small bar to cross for such an anticipated game, even if Metroid is known for being one of Nintendo’s weaker franchises in the sales department. This sales data spans the period from Prime 4‘s December 4 release date to December 31, so it’s also possible it has sold over a million units now and we just won’t know until the next quarterly report.
The last original Metroid game we had was Metroid Dread in 2021, which rapidly became the fastest-selling Metroid game ever in key markets like Japan, the US and UK. Within a month it almost certainly sold over a million copies, reaching 3 million sales by the end of 2022, establishing itself as the best-selling Metroid game.
With Prime 4 having so much development time and costs poured into the game, it’s a shame to not see it perform better. Hopefully we’ll get more information on its performance in the next Nintendo sales update, but for now, we’ll just have to hope that Samus can return to our screens again soon without another big delay between releases.
