Post by cm30 on Feb 26, 2016 19:06:00 GMT -5
Because I was bored, I put the various Mario RPGs from each series (Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi) into Google Trends, to see which ones were more or less popular over time.
Interestingly, it seems like the popularity for each game in Google is very different to what you'd expect. For Mario & Luigi:
It seems strangely enough, Superstar Saga was the most popular title, with a huge spike in searches around its release date. Meanwhile, poor Bowser's Inside Story somehow doesn't even chart on it, at least for very long, and Partners in Time doesn't do much better.
Part of me wonders how much of that is really about the games, and how much is simply cause Superstar Saga has a really popular art style. A lot of fan games, ROM hacks, flash animations, web comics, etc tend to use its sprites, so I suspect searches for 'Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga sprites' probably factored into this.
As for Dream Team and Paper Jam... the former seems to have done better than the latter as far as searches go. It has a 'tail', where people keep searching for it (albeit less and less) for weeks or so. On the other hand, Paper Jam seems to have become a lot less popular than the past games (its peak is lower), and its popularity seems likely to keep dropping off every month.
For Paper Mario:
It's pretty clear that up until Sticker Star, each game was getting more and more popular. Surprise surprise, Sticker Star came out and popularity basically fell off a cliff. Seems Miyamoto was most definitely wrong about his assumption that story wasn't needed in an RPG and that they shouldn't add new characters.
It did moderately decent from about November 2012 to March 2013, then fell beneath the others.
So yeah, trend seems to be that a good Mario & Luigi game can sell for about six months or so, a bad one drops off after about a month or two and that every Paper Mario game before Sticker Star was more popular than the last.
Interestingly, it seems like the popularity for each game in Google is very different to what you'd expect. For Mario & Luigi:
It seems strangely enough, Superstar Saga was the most popular title, with a huge spike in searches around its release date. Meanwhile, poor Bowser's Inside Story somehow doesn't even chart on it, at least for very long, and Partners in Time doesn't do much better.
Part of me wonders how much of that is really about the games, and how much is simply cause Superstar Saga has a really popular art style. A lot of fan games, ROM hacks, flash animations, web comics, etc tend to use its sprites, so I suspect searches for 'Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga sprites' probably factored into this.
As for Dream Team and Paper Jam... the former seems to have done better than the latter as far as searches go. It has a 'tail', where people keep searching for it (albeit less and less) for weeks or so. On the other hand, Paper Jam seems to have become a lot less popular than the past games (its peak is lower), and its popularity seems likely to keep dropping off every month.
For Paper Mario:
It's pretty clear that up until Sticker Star, each game was getting more and more popular. Surprise surprise, Sticker Star came out and popularity basically fell off a cliff. Seems Miyamoto was most definitely wrong about his assumption that story wasn't needed in an RPG and that they shouldn't add new characters.
It did moderately decent from about November 2012 to March 2013, then fell beneath the others.
So yeah, trend seems to be that a good Mario & Luigi game can sell for about six months or so, a bad one drops off after about a month or two and that every Paper Mario game before Sticker Star was more popular than the last.
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