Metroid Prime 4 Sales Are So Bad In Japan That It’s Being Outsold By Welcome Tour
Nintendo 
Josh has been playing video games for longer than he can remember, kicking things off with a Master System before upgrading to a Mega Drive. Covering the industry since 2018, if a game has a strong story – or even better, the decisions you make determine the course of that story – odds are he’s going to like it. Or, you know, put Sonic or Pikachu on the cover and that’ll get his attention too.
After years of waiting, Metroid Prime 4 hasn’t hit quite as hard as a lot of fans of the series were hoping it might. Particularly in Japan, where the latest Metroid has failed to make it into the top 20 bestselling games of 2025 on both the Nintendo Switch and the Nintendo Switch 2.
Nintendo has shared the top 20 best-selling games of 2025 on both its consoles based on digital sales made through the eShop in Japan (thanks, Stealth40k). Metroid Prime 4 hasn’t made it into either chart, and while it didn’t have long to rack up sales, there are games on both lists that the newest first-party Nintendo game should be outselling, regardless of timeframe.
Metroid Prime 4 Misses Out On Nintendo s End-Of-Year Charts In Japan
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, for example, was the 13th best-selling Switch 2 game in Japan this year. Even though Welcome Tour only costs $10, it was slated at launch as being a game that should have been free, and presumably didn’t sell that well. Despite that, it has managed to far outsell Prime 4’s first few weeks of sales.
Tamagotchi Plaza, Fitness Boxing 3, and Street Fighter 6 are some of the other games to have sold more copies across Nintendo’s two newest consoles in 2025. However, the best example of how Nintendo might hope Metroid is performing is Kirby Air Riders. The third best-selling Switch 2 game of 2025 in Japan, even though it only had two weeks longer to rack up its end of year total than Prime 4.
Rumors of Metroid Prime 2 and 3 remasters have been around for so long, it’s hard to understand why we’re still waiting.
Metroid Games Don t Sell Well In Japan
The absence of Prime 4 from Nintendo’s best sellers in Japan comes on the heels of the latest Metroid game selling just 3,000 copies to Japanese Switch owners in its second week. Metroid games don’t typically sell well in Japan, but that’s a particularly bad drop off at roughly a third of Dread’s second week sales.
There are caveats left and right here, of course. The only snapshots we’ve been shown so far are from Japanese sales, which, again, typically tend to be lower for Metroid games. Particularly compared to Kirby, which is the exact opposite – huge in Japan, but not so much elsewhere.
Kirby is so popular in Japan that Air Riders has already outsold Donkey Kong Bananza.
It’s also worth noting that, despite its other series selling tens of millions of copies per title in some cases, Nintendo doesn’t expect that from Metroid. Metroid Dread is the best-selling game in the series and the only one to break three million copies. The original Metroid Prime was the best-selling of the 3D titles at 2.8 million copies sold, and with the two follow-ups and the original’s remaster all selling far fewer copies, despite Prime 4’s rough sales in Japan, if it hits two million, that might be enough to keep Nintendo happy.
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