I'm a little dubious of the "undercutting to force a sell-out" situation, wouldn't you rather just sell all the copies and boast the huge opening week, not to mention deliberately holding back supply just pisses off the people who want it and can't get it?
If the supply cut is due to some constraint that prevented SE from ordering 2M, then that's unfortunate, but not a disaster. This is the case with hardware, which HAS to be paced out; setting up a lot of factories to produce hardware is expensive, and if you try to push a lot of hardware early to satisfy demand, you end up with production facilities going unused and wasting money when the initial surge is over.
Now if the cut in production is due to revised sales estimates, then SE is in deep trouble; this is the most expensive Final Fantasy game they've made, so they need it to sell huge. While I have no idea exactly how much it cost, or how many copies they need to sell to break even, I'm guessing they want XIII to outsell XII. For comparison, every major FF game (XI was a different genre and doesn't count) since moving to the PS sold approx 2M on it's opening week in Japan; the lowest was X-2 which only did 1.5M.
If FFXIII fails to sell as well as previous games, while costing a lot more, it puts the future of the whole franchise in jeopardy.
Veder Juda is hand crafted from EPIC FAIL, and is a 96% certified Looney; the other 4% is a work in progress.
