Nintendo's GameCube Era Dominated by Its Own Games, with Only Two Third-Party Titles

Back in the GameCube era, Nintendo's lack of third-party support was downright infamous. A newly released chart of the platform's best-selling games suggests there's a reason most publishers steered clear of the 'cube.

Bestselling Gamecube Games All Time

The 20 best-selling US GameCube games of all time were shared today. And the top spots on the list are dominated Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, and Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

lead the list, with just two third-party entries squeezing in: Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Mega Collection.

I was just old enough to recognize how weird it was to be getting Sega games on a Nintendo platform. And I guess that novelty helped propel these Sonic games near the top of the charts. Happy 25th to the Nintendo GameCube!

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Things Even Out Rest Top

Things even out in the rest of the top 20. There, five of the remaining ten come from third parties, with Lego Star Wars, Sonic Heroes, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, Super Monkey Ball 2, and SoulCalibur 2. Namco's fighting game might have had a slight advantage with Nintendo fans, though, since they put Link in it.

Perspectives on the GameCube era suggest that Resident Evil 4. Which launched as a GameCube exclusive, is now widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time. It landed just outside the top 20 at number 21.

Having sold 7,899 fewer units than Kir No wonder the Capcom Five eventually went multi-platform.

Unfortunately, we don't have similar stats for the modern Switch era. Wikipedia's list of best-selling Switch games is also top-heavy with Nintendo titles. However, that's certainly at least partly due to the fact that third-parties tend not to publicly report sales data per platform.

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Meanwhile, Nintendo is happy to report every new million that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold. Given the fact that third-party developers were very willing to put in the work to downgrade their PS4 and Xbox One games to get them running on Switch. It seems all but certain that there was an appetite for third-party games on the platform.

And that trend seems to be continuing on Switch 2.

I wonder if The Elder Scrolls 6 will be out Donkey Kong 64 beat Pokemon mania to become the best-selling game of 1999 in the US. Nintendo games are arguably the reason to own a Nintendo console, even today. But with developers keen to get their games in front of as many players as possible.

You can find plenty of third-party titles among the best Switch 2 games out there.