Fun With Nintendo Numbers

A few months ago I had a little fun with Sony and Microsoft sales figures.  Now Nintendo has released some updated numbers of their own, so I thought I'd take a moment and run their sales figures through the Number Cruncher and see what happens.  Before we get to that though, take a guess at which of Nintendo's franchises is their top seller.  Go on, guess.  Ready?  Super Mario, of course, with 182 million units sold.  And the worst seller, as far as these numbers go?  The Metroid series, although moving 10 million units is nothing to sneeze at, considering that there have only been seven entries in the series at this point.  Mario's appeared in more games than I care to count.

Now then, on to the math.  Ever wonder how many video games the average gamer has in his or her collection?  Let's take an educated guess.  Nintendo claims that 18.76 million GameCubes have been sold worldwide since the system hit stores in 2001, while 160.6 million units of software ("games") have been sold during the same time period.  A little division reveals that the average GameCube owner also owns eight games (rounding down, of course).  Meanwhile, 67.77 million Game Boy Advances are out there in the wild along with 280.03 million games.  More math means that the average Game Boy Advance owner possesses only four games.  I'd have thought the GBA owners would own more games, seeing as how they are cheaper and somewhat more "disposable" in the eyes of children.

Even though the Nintendo DS is still a young device, let's check out those numbers as well.  Nintendo estimates that 1.89 million DS units have sold around the world, while 3.38 million games have been sold as well.  That puts each DS owner with an average of one game each (again, rounding down).  I wonder if the stories about DS owners picking up Super Mario 64 DS, finishing it, and then putting the DS in a closet until new games come out have some truth to them after all.