Consoles Sales in the USA from August-December (post GTA edition)

[Steve 3.2]

While I would love to see Nintendo sell an additional 4M units in the last five months of this year, it has taken them just under nine months to reach 4M so far in the Americas. So while Nintendo will sell every last Wii they make before the holidays, there won't be a total of 8M in the Americas by December 31, 2007. I expect about 7.25M instead.

(Some of the figures I used to come up with my prediction: with a the current rate of manufacture of 1.25M and slowly increasing to 1.5M, and Nintendo allocating roughly 40% of all units to the Americas, that would give Nintendo an additional 2.75M Wiis shipped over here by the end of the year. If the rumors are true and Nintendo of America has been stockpiling a few Wiis for later in the year, I don't believe it would be anything more than about a half million units in the States. So that would be a total of 3.25M.)

I think your numbers for the 360 are spot on. There are so many positive and negative variables in play with the system that most will cancel each other out and leave only a modest increase in sales for the rest of the year. There will be a total of 9.5M 360s sold in the US by the end of this year.

(I'm really interested in seeing how many additional systems Halo 3 sells. If the pre-sales have been a strong and reports indicate, MS may have a greater problem on its hands. How many people are going to pre-purchase a game and not already own the system? So sales of about 2.89M for the remainder of the year.)

PS3 will do better slightly better than your expectations. I think there are a lot more 60GB systems than even Sony cares to admit to having on hand. I think they'll be able to get through most of November before the sku completely sells out. With some other promotions and another new sku, Sony should be able to sell about 2.25M PS3 and end up with 4M total in the Americas.

(I believe Sony has about 500-750K 60GB models remaining in inventory. And it would be suicide to leave only the $600 model to fight on this holiday season. So Sony needs to either drop the price on that bundle or come up with a new sku to fill the $500 space. It may be as simple as dropping the game and price. Or they may have something else up their sleeve.)