I think your Wii numbers are on the low side...  if things continue exactly the same as they have for the Wii up until Christmas, with no increase in systems for Christmas then your numbers are in the ballpark, but if they increase shipments for christmas... then you are on the real low end.

As for the PS3...  that's kinda scary...  and I think those numbers are on the low end as well.  If the PS3 enters the holliday season with low numbers like that, a price cut had better be on the counter... and not some 100-200$ one... they better drop it by 300$ and eat the huge losses if they want to stay in the games market. bahh it's all speculation...   

you do understand why Eye of Judgment is a major deal right?

Every anime fan and card game fan in the world has been waiting for something like Yu-Gi-Oh where their monsters come to life. So logically every anime fan or card game player who sees the game will be like OMG and since Japan has the largest Card game/Anime fanbase in the world, largely due to thats where they are mostly from, there will be a huge amount of sales when the game is released as well as during the holiday months.

ssj12 said: Every anime fan and card game fan in the world has been waiting for something like Yu-Gi-Oh where their monsters come to life. So logically every anime fan or card game player who sees the game will be like OMG and since Japan has the largest Card game/Anime fanbase in the world, largely due to thats where they are mostly from, there will be a huge amount of sales when the game is released as well as during the holiday months.

Yes, I understand that logic. That's why I said, " It looks very cool in theory, but I'll have to see a finished product before I can deliver an accurate assessment." I've seen many, many products that looked unbelievable in previews or under staged conditions, only to find that they were disappointments in practice. Eye of Judgement could be a major success (there are a lot of people who participate in collectible card games) or it could turn out to be a giant stinker of a gimmick. I don't know which one it will be; I have to see what the game actually turns into before making a prediction.

One major barrier that will have to be overcome in reaching a mass audience is the price issue. The PS3 is still sitting at $600 here in the US, and I believe I heard that Eye of Judgement is going to ask for a $100 price tag all by itself. That could be a major problem - games like this are particularly subject to momentum, where having friends with the game to battle against helps drive further sales. Pokemon has obviously benefitted from this, as you get whole schools full of kids training monsters to fight against each other. If Eye of Judgement can reach the same critical mass, it could also pull in a similar target audience. I'm just cautioning that the price gap between purchasing a DS for Diamond/Pearl and a PS3 for Eye of Judgement will be a problem.

Gundam Musou was supposed to be very popular as well. Didn't do a lot for the PS3 and was a big disappointment for the developer.

Gundam was expected to sell 500k and it hasn't even reached 300k yet, so that's a pretty big disappointment. VF5 was also somewhat anticipated and it is barely above 80k. NGS and Folksoul have also done poorly.

Sadly I don't see the Eye of Judgement as being that big of deal. There's a lot of ugly people who just don't want a camera inside the house. I know the point is to point it at the table... but knowing the camera is in the house would bother some people.

Seriously... people have got to start doubting the long term 'greatness' of the PS3 in Japan. I don't know if it's possible to take a drastic shift any more... i don't know how often people compare the sales curves of consoles in Japan, but I do it all the time, and the PS3 is almost about to be one of the worst curves that has ever happened... that is BAD. Do you think that this can turn around? Will the release of big games just be little 'blips' in sales?

The PS3 needs something to drastically change the buying curve, it needs to be lifted out of a rut, titles that lift sales for 3 weeks slightly then drop back down aren't good enough. The console needs to sell over 30k a week to even start to build any kind of respectable base... i mean it hasn't even hit 1 million base yet. There are WAY more than 1 million otaku in Japan so why aren't even the Otaku buying it?

I have a few friends in Japan, on the radio these days the comedians even bag the console out because it's got fantastic graphics but the games just suck.

The curve is indeed bad. If you look at the first year of the PS1 & PS2, each had no more than one week under 10k sold. It's likely that those bad weeks were supply shortages as well. In addition, the video game market was smaller for the PS2 and even smaller for the PS1. I don't know if any major console has had so many sub-10k weeks in Japan within 7 months of launch.

As much as I would like to say that the preference of the Japaneese market was altered by Nintendo when they released the DS I really don't believe that is true. I believe that Nintendo was so successful with the DS mainly because they came to realize how the Japaneese market worked and why it was shrinking.

Japan is driven mostly by unique gameplay experiences ...

I know, now someone will point out that Dragon Quest IIX and Final Fantasy XII sold amazingly well and are far from unique gameplay experiences but I think they're missing something. Arcades in North America and Europe died in the 90's as the Playstation and N64 brought very powerful gaming hardware into a person's home. At the same time Arcades continued to do (reasonably) well in Japan mainly because you could have specialized hardware that provided a drastically different gameplay experience than a home console.

Since (about) 2000 Arcades have been running into the same problems in Japan that American arcades faced in the 90s. In my opinion this comes from the inability to produce unique gameplay experiences anymore ...

Mind you this is just my theory that I came up and is probably wrong ...