Mario Kart 8 races to 1.2 million sales
Nintendo was hoping that Mario Kart 8 would help the struggling Wii U come to life, as we detailed earlier this morning, it appears to have done so. Mario Kart 8 tipped the scales at over 1.2 million in sales over the weekend, a 3 day period, with the game having only released on Friday.
Prior to the game’s launch, roughly on 6 million Wii U’s were in circulation worldwide. That would stand to reason that had no systems sold (which we know isn’t the case) one in every six Wii U owners picked up the new Mario Kart title. Thanks to the sales of Mario Kart 8, the series as a whole has now sold over 100 million copies.
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For some perspective, since its release in 2008, Mario Kart for the Nintendo Wii has sold 35.53 million copies.
While both the Gamecube and the Game Boy Advance entries in the Mario Kart series saw decreases in sales from the popular Nintendo 64 title, the series has only gained steam as a whole.
Most impressively for the Mario Kart series was the amount of consoles that the game helped to move. As reported earlier, Mario Kart 8 boosted Wii U sales by 666%. That bump was cemented by 82% of those sales being the Wii U bundle with Mario Kart 8.
Nintendo rolled out a game on Friday that consumers felt was not only worth $60, but also deemed worth the price of a full console as well (roughly $250).
As Nintendo enjoys the success of the most recent Mario Kart release, the boost in Wii U sales will only continue to help the bottom line and the company now has a much larger user base to sell other software and accessories to.
With Super Smash Bros. on the horizon for the Wii U, it will be interesting to see how the other juggernaut franchise does in terms of tipping the console movement scales. At any rate, Nintendo employees have to be pretty excited about their weekend.