First, Raving Rabbids isn't Rayman. Outside of the first one or so, they were always marketed as their own franchice.
The other thing you neglate is the timing. You can't compare games from the NES and the Playstation without some adjustments. The NES was a cold market. The PS1 was a warm market. Rayman sales should be higher because it sold in an established market during a boom period. Megaman was in a cold market and had a bigger struggle to make sales.
I said it because most of what you said was wrong. Because of that, I doubt you did any fact checking into it.
1)Think I noted that in my original post. Don't remember
2)You didn't check your facts. The best selling game on the PS1 is Gran Turismo an VGchartz has it at 3.87 million. Rayman, in total, was about 4 million. However, Wikipedia says it's the best selling UK game of all time at 5 million. That doesn't add up. The article it links to doesn't quote any numbers and references a site where, from what I can tell so far, you can't get the data from (may take some finagling though).
3)The fact that Rayman is still alive and people wanted Megaman WAY more should tell you something.
OK, let me explain the theory because it applies in almost any situation.
Say you're eating Ice Cream. You love ice cream right. You have one and you like it a lot. So you have another. It's not as good as the first one you had, but still good. You have another. Not as good. If you keep eating ice cream, you'd soon be sick of it, or just plain sick. The theory is that for each thing you consume, you will derive less benefit, or utility, from it.
The same is true here. The response to Snake was huge. People went crazy over it. When Sonic was finally announced, people were excited, but it didn't get the same insane reaction that Snake had. The same is true of Mega Man. People were ecstatic to see him, though the overall response was not was huge as Snake, when he flood gates were first opened. The response to Pac-Man was about the same as every other character really. Some people like it, and some didn't. The only people who were really ecstatic were those who wanted him already but it wasn't shared by everyone else.
One thing people do in this thread is overstate how popular Rayman actually is (
found Shortie's poll. He was pretty low, behind Bomberman and Simon). The question is, would Rayman excite people more than another Nintendo character? The answer I think is no. Rayman would be polarized. Some people would like him and others wouldn't. I think another issue would be that some people won't feel he's worthy enough, and that's is true of all the other third party characters. The issue with third party characters is we are reaching a leveling off or even negative utility. Unless there is a new phenomenon from a third party company on Nintendo's system, there isn't a character that will please everyone to justify its inclusion. It's not unlike Soul Caliber where guest characters are quickly forgotten. In the end, I don't think there is much we can do with third party characters and the gimmick has ran its course.
