One of the things that many fans and gamers of Nintendo’s Wii U were hoping for is that first-party titles like Mario Kart 8 would help to boost the console’s sales. Well as you might have heard, it did help to boost sales in Japan, and now it looks like it might have had some success in the US as well.
According to analyst David Gibson, he found that Mario Kart 8’s release managed to boost Wii U sales in the US by as much as 4.1 week over week. This seems to be more than Japan’s figures which more or less doubled, which we reckon is still pretty good anyway. Gibson goes on to note that the game managed to sell 450,000 units in its first 3 days in the US.
Presumably this helped to contribute to the game’s sales of 1.2 million copies worldwide. This is a bigger number than Mario Kart 7 which only managed 250,000 in its first three days. It also seems that Mario Kart 8 could have more anticipated than its predecessor as Gibson notes that attach rate for the new game was 18% versus Mario Kart 7’s 7%.
Will these numbers be enough to help Nintendo fight against sagging sales of their consoles? Well some believe that it can, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps combine that with the upcoming titles that Nintendo revealed during E3 will help boost sales overall, so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for.
Filed in . Read more about Mario Kart 8, Nintendo and Wii U.