Actually, you may have a point in the DS not stopping selling before the Wii. I just naturally assumed that, but it may very well have been wrong.
That would flaw my "analysis" (if you can call it that. Hypothesis might be a better word) up. Sorry if I seemed a bit aggressive in my post, that was by no means my intention.
If I look at it a bit simple. The two major changes that we know of are:
- The effect of the Wii price cut
- The effect of NSMB Wii.
I have little doubt that the effect of the price cut will be more of a boost for MKWii than NSMB Wii will have on NSMB DS.
I tend to like predicting by quarters of years. My MKWii predictions for this year were (these are, of course, the averages I expected, not the minimums as some people tend to predict)
150K/week for the first 26 weeks = 3.9M
100K/week for the next 13 weeks = 1.3M
Last 13 weeks: 3.5M
Total for 2009: 8.7M
It's not meeting my expectations, though. It looks to end at 4.5M for the first 39 weeks, rather than 5.2M. But the case is that the evergreen titles are directly linked to the hardware sales of their machine.
The Wii has been underperforming. Even moreso than MKWii, actually. If the price cut boosts the Wii's HW sales back up to the early 09/all of 08 sales, will that boost MKWii up to 125K/week again?
I think it might. Although MKWii will now have more competition than before (NSMB Wii is a direct competitor to MKWii, as you correctly said).
Another thing to note, is that hardly any games see a boost again. They drop with the HW sales, but they don't increase again when the hardware sales increase. Although we do have lacking data on this, so that may be incorrect.
If MKWii does boost, we could be seeing a "120K vs 50K" pr week scenario. As I expect a mere million in advance by the end of the year, that would mean that it will happen in early Q2.
You can put me down for Q2, if that's not too unprecise.
I think that these two games are likely to become the best selling games (save the Wii Play/Sports) of the generation. NSMB should end in the 28-33M group, whereas I see Mario Kart Wii in the 30-40M range (40M being rather unlikely).
