Consumers can be fickle and it's hard to say when the Wii may decline in sales or something comes out for one of the other consoles that all of a sudden makes it a must have and to forget the wii altogether.

Would I be shocked if the wii sales don't stay at the pace they have been on for the first year? Not really. Could it continue selling at this pace? Possibly. Time will tell exactly how it will work out. In Japan it appears as though there is a shift in which console to buy as they have been outsold by the PS3 for a few weeks now. the PS3 had some rather abysmal sales in Japan and recent successes could show that there is a shift and gamers are beginning to jump onto the sony ship and jump away from the nintendo one.

Well, you're making a pretty large assumption that the Wii's marketshare can only shrink from its current position which may not be true ...

Assume for a moment that developers start devoting equal resources to the Wii as to the PS3 and XBox 360; being that Wii games are so much less expensive to produce there will be 3 to 4 times as many games of similar genres on the Wii, and each of these games will be of a similar quality as the PS3 or XBox 360 games. Most consumers are (fairly) rational and you would see them looking at the $150 Wii with 3 to 4 times the library of the $250/$300 XBox 360/PS3 and favouring the Wii; once this  occurs developers could allocate more resources to the Wii and compound the issue.

Only if Developers decide to allocate a token ammount of resources towards the Wii does the XBox 360 or PS3 have a chance to compete.

Do you care to provide any sort of precident for this? There exists no such game that will make a majority of consumers forget about another device entirely.

In fact, the new precident that the Wii is setting is that consumers originally unintersted in gaming are suddenly becoming interested. It's very obvious that this trend will only become bigger as more people are exposed to the Wii.

If you want to stick to reality, the most likely scenario going forward is that the Wii will increase in sales consistently for the next 4 or 5 years. And when Nintendo starts to have any sort of supply pileup, they can simply drop the price. They haven't done that yet but they could easily afford to drop the price by 1/2. That would make the Wii affordable to a lot more people who want to get into the experience.

Suggesting that the Wii won't decimate its 2007 sales in 2008 is silly and every time I see someone say it, they either have no reasoning or some hopefully silly logic that involves people "waking up" and realizing they couldn't possibly be having that much fun with their Wii.  Or people suddenly becoming technically savvy graphics snobs that want the best possible high definition experience.  So, you know, the 0.5% of the market that insists on buying HD-DVDs and BDs instead of DVDs.

Final Fantasy VII.

That game put the Playstation on the map for a lot of gamers and stole a lot of the n64's thunder.

It'd be ironic if Final Fantasy XIII did something similar.

@jjseth:  Sorry about the keyboard. 
@harvey:  I couldn't resist, that was a great opening.

Actually, im making the assumption that the 360 and ps3 will go up rather than the wii going down. lets say the wii sells a million units a month. I believe they will maintain the same numbers while the 360 and ps3 raise thier numbers significantly year over year.

Oh yeah, Sony was switching to a newer format compared to the old cartridges.  Where have we heard that before?

Less than 10% of the US playstation owners bought Final Fantasy 7. More than twice as many people in the US bought super mario 64. So, uh, how exactly was this a huge release that killed the N64?

Ironically, the example of the playstation supports my arguments more than yours -- the PS had a wide variety of diverse software that sold well and was very underpowered compared to the N64.  Third party development was significantly cheaper, which attracted the third parites, and the install base grew rapidly which also attracted third parties.  It's quite a bit like the Wii and not so much like the PS3.

A more reasonable assumption to make will be that Nintendo will continue to sell out despite increasing production to 1.8 million units per month. So it might be a little more reasonable to assume Nintendo will sell nearly twice as many units in 2008 than they did in 2007, than it is to assume Nintendo's sales won't go up significantly with a significant increase in produciton.

I really think that the 360 and PS3 will increase in the next year by the % of consoles purchased. Basically I see things starting to even out where no console is completely slaughtering the other for 2008. That's my opinion and I'm not really going to change my thoughts on that.

Maybe they are overestimating, or underestimating, but hey come on is just a guess.