4 ms·

Following your logic, I want to congratulate Microsoft for the mandatory Windows XP Service Pack 2--the most popular software download ever!

• mjn 12y ago
  There's actually a lot of debate about that in games: best-selling games tend to be often at least in part boosted by bundling with consoles. For example, the two best-selling games of all time by some counts are Tetris and Wii Sports, but somewhere around 25% of Tetris's sales came from being bundled with the Gameboy, and >95% of Wii Sports sales were from bundling. (You can see some of that debate in the endless archives of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...). Just discounting bundled sales doesn't seem quite right either, though. If you're measuring a game's ability to independently market itself, maybe, but if you're using it as a proxy for game popularity, # of players, cultural reach, etc., then bundled games like Super Mario Bros genuinely have a ton of players and historical importance.