The point that I'm trying to make it that a lot of people come up with that excuse as a reason for why the Playstation family of consoles has sold so well instead of, you know, just being good consoles.

I hate that stupid noid....

There are many reasons:

(1) The DS didn't start off nearly as hot as the Wii. It picked up momentum for the same reasons the Wii will pick up momentum: great variety of good to great games at a nice price.

(2) The Wii is supply constrained right now. Demand is much higher than supply, especially in the US. People can only speculate as to what sales numbers would be like if Nintendo was able to meet demand world wide.

(3) Sales tend to snowball for the Wii, especially in the US. Each Wii on the market is a potential advertisement for itself -- people take the Wii to their family's house for thanksgiving and 5 non-gamers want to buy one. This kind of thing is unheard of in gaming.

(4) The Wii hasn't had a price drop yet, but the low manufacturing costs suggest Nintendo could easily sell the device at $99 if they needed to.

(5) Tons of third party support has been shifting to the Wii.

Lifetime sales are very, very hard to calculate. It's easy to suggest, however, that the Wii will almost certainly outsell its first year of sales in the next few years because Nintendo has not yet met demand, has not yet dropped the price, and a lot of third party exclusive support shifted to the Wii in the first year.

Track DS sales against the Wii on this site.

[edit] corrected to say what I meant.  Third party support is shifting to the Wii, not first party.

 I'm not saying it did  not sell in huge numbers and isn't the best selling home console of all time but I am saying a significant number are rebuys after breakdown and this comes from personal experience of owning Sony and Nintendo consoles.

Therefore I believe because Nintendo consoles are built to last the Wii will not get the millions of extra sales the PS1/2 had due to breakdown.

But its true, they dont have 120 million different purchasers. Like the Ipod, they also have repeat buyers of the same unit. The old PS2 eventually broke, they rebought the PS2 cause it was now slim in design, or they may even just want a upstairs ps2 and and downstairs ps2 cause its so cheap.

Sales are biased in favor of Nintendo. People only buy the Wii and DS because they unfairly favor those products.

Great post. I agree completely.

Now I want to ask to Eugene if he agree or not with those points raised by  BigFatJ and why .

Why will Wii sales be so high?

Because 360/PS3 are (mostly) limited to the same base that the last generation had and are fighting a 3 way race for that market share.

Wii is not limited to that base. It appeals to people who did not have a console last generation (girls, women, seniors, lapsed gamers) as well as those who did. Therefore it's sales potential are much higher than 360/PS3 or even PS2's.

But they did have a re designed ps 1 and people wanted to buy it just because of that even though they already had a ps1.