Metroid Prime 5 Just Became Much More Unlikely at Nintendo

The potential for Metroid Prime 5 to one day be released by Nintendo seems to have just become much more unlikely. Upon its launch at the end of 2025, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was met with a bit of a mixed response. While many were simply thrilled to see the long-awaited sequel released whatsoever almost a decade after being announced, the game itself felt dated in some areas, which led to it being one of the worst-reviewed entries in the Metroid Prime franchise. Now, it looks like this mixed reception has greatly impacted Metroid Prime 4’s sales, which doesn’t bode well for the series moving forward.

As of today, Nintendo revealed its latest financial report, which shared data on its consoles and games through March 31, 2026. Curiously, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was nowhere to be found in this data, which implies that the game still hasn’t passed one million copies sold. Given that many other Nintendo-developed games pretty easily clear this threshold, it proves that Metroid Prime 4 hasn’t performed very well at all, especially given how much time and money were put into the title.

What’s even worse about this is that most games tend to sell a majority of their lifetime sales in their first months or year on the market. With this in mind, there’s little hope for Metroid Prime 4 to suddenly blow up and begin selling copies at a much higher rate, especially since Nintendo doesn’t regularly discount its own games.

Because of this poor performance from Metroid Prime 4, it will surely make Nintendo question whether or not it should look to create Metroid Prime 5 in the future. Although Metroid as a whole surely won’t end up going away, the Prime series has never sold at a very high rate, despite historically being quite acclaimed. Given that MP4 didn’t reach expectations both critically and commercially, though, Nintendo may just choose to retire this sub-series altogether.

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Then again, with how notoriously messy the development of Metroid Prime 4 was, Nintendo might just be willing to write this entry off and not make any drastic takeaways from its performance. Assuming that work on a potential Metroid Prime 5 went much more smoothly, perhaps this future installment would be able to find its footing much more than MP4 has been able to.

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