Quote:Okay, you started it...
Ladies and gentlemen, I will now show why Conker's BFD should be considered the best selling game ever. (If you make me mad, I'll get out the mathematical formulas. You don't want that.)
Since Conker was released at the very tail end of the N64's life cycle, nobody paid attention. If the game had been released a couple years earlier, it would have sold much better. As it was, Conker accounted for the vast majority of sales for all N64 games released from March 2001 on. I would say 90% would be an accurate guess. Certainly this is remarkable. By extending this logic, I will now say that if Conker had been released as a launch title, it would have accounted for 90% of sales in the N64's history. I don't really know how many N64 games were sold, but it was a lot. Now, if Nintendo had advertised Conker better and the N64 was not considered a kiddy machine, this number would have been even larger. And if the N64 had the userbase of the PSX, or, gasp, the NES, it would have sold even more. Undoubtably, this makes Conker the best selling game ever.
Now why did Nintendo ditch Rare again?
That's not a fair comparison since Conker was one of the last games to be released for the dying N64. Would it have sold better during the system's prime? Yes, it would have. But would it have accounted for 90% of the system's software sales? Probably not, since it would have had a lot more competition.
As much as you might want to ignore it, the Gamecube's userbase is a lot smaller than the PS2's, and Sony's marketing is far more aggressive and effective than Nintendo's. It does take a lot longer for a Gamecube game to pass the million sales mark than it does for a PS2 game, believe it or not. Even the guys at Capcom acknowledged this.