Wii 10 mln. or PS3 5 mln. in Japan. Who first?

[ViolentPhlegm]

@ioi:

Some good points, of course, especially with regards to which titles will push hardware, but some things I don't really get:

1) How does Wii being non-supply constrained last year result in higher sales this year? Shouldn't it be the other way around? If they had been short last year you could say that the drop in sales was artificial and that the Wii demand in Japan was actually higher than it looks. But that wasn't the case. It dropped something like 40% over supply-constrained (and therefore artificially low) Holiday 2007. This strikes me as a serious slowdown in momentum.

Do you mean that the lower post-holiday sales this year is an artificial drop because 2008's post-holiday sales were artificially high due to the supply problem for Christmas 2007? Because that would potentially make sense to me.

I don't mean to be difficult about this, I'm just trying to figure out what you're suggesting. On the surface of it, it sounds like you're arguing against a stronger Wii holiday because it comes across as, "Wii sales were down last year and that is an accurate indication of the demand trend." See why this is confusing?

2) Is 2 million new Wii owners based on SMB really conceivable when they only sold 1.1 million hardware units over Sept to March period last year? These are people who will buy the hardware for that game but rejected not only SMG but Nintendo's entire Wii lineup to date including everything from Brawl to Zelda? If they can push 2 million new users, then yeah, that decides it.

I'm still not really sure on the 5 mi / 10 mil race, but in terms of a yoy holiday increase I went into this just assuming that it was going to be less likely in Japan than anywhere else. The things I saw were:
1) Serious momentum deterioration in the Japanese charts but not elsewhere,
2) first holiday season with a serious competitor in Japan,
3) FFXIII releases in Japan but nowhere else.

But I may have underestimated the 2D Mario effect, it seems...