UNCgolf
Well-Known Member
The only animated film that’s made more than Mario is Frozen II.
Mario’s been the most enduring video game franchise for four decades now.
Younger generations game more than consume other forms of media.
Some of you continue to greatly underestimate this market.
It's more that people don't really understand the video game market on both sides.
There are absolutely people who significantly underestimate it, but there are also people who wildly overestimate it because they look at the market as a whole and not individual properties. The overall video game market is gigantic, but it's spread wildly across segments (including mobile games like Candy Crush which account for a significant percentage of the overall market) and thousands of properties.
Individual game properties generally have a much smaller reach than other forms of media for many reasons. Highly successful movies can easily have 100+ million distinct viewers (even into several hundred million); there are only a handful of video games ever that have had 100+ million distinct players.
Mario is really an outlier in the gaming market because he's been around for several decades with dozens of games across multiple genres. There probably haven't been any Mario games that have had 100 million players (maaaybe Mario Kart 8), but there are almost certainly 100+ million people who have played at least one Mario game.
TLDR: Video games as a whole are massively popular; individual gaming IPs, on the other hand, are generally not comparable in popularity to legacy media. That could change going forward, but we aren't there yet.