MarioWiki:Reception and sales

While detailing the fictional minutiae of the Mario franchise is great, illustrating its real-world impact and popularity is just as important. Creating sections detailling the critical and commercial reception of individual games is one way to do it.

Reception
Ideally, sections about the critical reception should describe what the consensus about a given game is by isolating recurring statements in professional reviews, rather than simply throwing up a list of scores. If one or more aspects (such as the soundtrack or a game mechanic) are frequently praised or criticized, it is a good idea to highlight said frequency by quoting at least one outlet and linking to other publications that express a similar sentiment, via the tags, preferably with a quote next to the link in the reference itself. It is also a good idea to showcase a wide variety of opinions- even in the case of widely acclaimed game, it is preferable to quote at least one outlier as to ensure the section is not too one-sided.

Review aggregators such as Metacritic or GameRanking are useful tools for writing reception sections, as they give a collection of reviews that can be used as a starting point. However, they rarely, if ever, feature pre-2000 content, which means finding historic reviews for anything that came out before Paper Mario require more extensive research.

User score on larger publications and Nintendo's own built-in systems (such as on the 3DS or WiiU eshop) can also be used, especially if there's a noticeable discepancy between critic and player reception.

Of course, reviews are not the only things that can be used for reception sections. Ranked lists, post-mortem article and the like can also illustrate a given game's legacy. However, it's generally unadvisable to make qualitative statements such as "The game was well-received on Miiverse", as these statements are prone to weasel-wording and can hardly be "proven" one way or another.

Sales data
Finding reliable sales figure can be problematic, thanks to the videogame industry's notorious secrecy toward financial data. Here's some pointers to what you should and should not use.

Several independent firms such as the NPD Group (North America), Chart Track (United Kingdoms) and Media Create (Japan) track game sales at retail chains. While these organisations do not have access to 100% of any given region's sales data, they're one of the very few authoritative source of hard data, and are often used by video game companies. Though most of the data is not available to non-subscribers, the trackers frequently publish monthly reports.

Press releases from Nintendo and other corporate sources are also accurate, and occasionally include digital sales numbers, which the aforementioned trackers do not factor in. However, said press releases frequently give the numbers of copies shipped to retailers rather than actual sales, so users should examine the wording before citing them.

VGChartz
Due to its popularity and being the most immediatly visible sourcee when researching sales data, it's hard not to address VGChartz

Much has been written about VGChartz reliability. As explained on the site's methodology page, it has access to data from an undefined sampling of "retail partners" and guess the rest based on various trends (while the aforementioned trackers do not have access to every retail chain and do some number of "filling in the blanks", they are proven to track a substantial amount of retailler, unlike VGChartz). The fact that VGChartz numbers have frequently been contradicted  by more official channels and other anomalies (In one instance, the site reported the game Arc Rise Fantasia as a best-seller for June 2010 despite the game not being released until the end of July) have led to several sites banning it as a source. As far as the wiki is concerned, VGChartz is not reliable and should not be used as a reference for sales data.