mrstickball said:
I would assume that, by the article, that it means that there are actually at or near 4m preorders for H3 at the stores, as an indication of what consumer preorders are, and what they expect. Is this possible? Absolutely. Halo 2 sold 3 million units in November, and another 1.5+ in December of 2004, with MS stating only 1.5m units were preordered by retailers. Now, what matter is if all of those 4m preorders follow through? I would assume that in November, about 5m unit sales is the max theoretically possible if it comes out in November. How is it possible? Price drop, HUGE tier ratios, and it's the first Halo for the system. Halo was a launch title, H2 owners had to only wait 3 years for H2 (although the vast majority of sales were slow for H1, therefore not the uber-fanbase that h2 to h3 has). For the majority of the Halo 2 owners (which bought 75% of the copies in November and December in 04), they've had to wait a friggin' long time. What could this game see sales wise? I would say 6m in the US is the lowest number possible. It has been on gamestats.com's #1 list for nearly a year, with only a few titles such as Gears of War and Zelda:TP ever dethroning it, and only for a few days. I say 8.5m units in the US, and another 6.5m in Europe and Japan. This should with GTAIV and LO, move 6 million hardware units this Nov-Dec. Can MS supply enough units? Of course! They've had nearly 2 years to work with manufacturers. Once the price drop hits, they will have ramped up for it already. Heck, just because MS shipped 500k units this quarter doesn't mean that they didn't make more. It could be possible that the reason MS lost so much money is that they made an additional 500k or 1m units to hold back for later this year. Don't believe its possible? MS only shipped 900k in the pre-holiday quarter, only to ship out 4.4m units in October through December. | 
