So how is the Wii tracking compared to the PS2 within the same timeframe?

[TheSource]

I think Wii is capable of 52-57m USA, 14-17m Japan, 35-45m Western Europe. It could be more in the USA than even 57m really - PS2 had 19m in it after selling 4.7m in 2004 the analogue year to Wii in 2010 (partly on a spike to 5.5m in 2005), and Wii sold 7.1m in 2010, and costs more than PS2 did in 2004.

So it has to have at least 20m left in the USA with price cuts and the history of higher trajectory. Throw in Canada, Latin America, Australia, South Korea, and the rest of the world and you're talking about 130m lifetime (55m USA / 5m Canada / 4m Latin America, 15m Japan, 40m Western Europe, 3m South Korea, plus Australia and so on).

I have data suggesting NES sold 80,000 units in the USA in its 10th Christmas (Dec 1994) which puts its cycle at only a year shorter than PS2 in the USA (PS2 sold 75,000 in its 11th Christmas - Dec 2010). Since Wii is bigger than NES AND PS2 in the USA you have to expect a really long tail if they price it well and continue to repackage / offer new bundles.

You all have to remember two things as well -

1) Some publishers - THQ, Ubisoft, Lucas Arts, WB Interactive - are fairly dependent on Wii now. If you look at VGC data in 2010, the third party market for Wii is actually growing still, even though SW shipments fell from 199m in Jan-Dec 2008 to 198m in Jan-Dec 2009, and to 185m in Jan-Dec 2010. If Nintendo hadn't bundled extra sw with Wii in 2010, its sw on Wii would have dropped 30% in 2010 - but the third party market didn't fall overall.

2) Wii had a monstrous Christmas in 2009 on its first price cut (put it this way, USA Wii sales in Dec 2009 were equal to 1/4 of all PS3 sales from 2006-2010 in the USA and Wii was nominally in decline by this point). By that point PS3 was half of its initial cost, Call of Duty was huge for the HD systems, and many of the evergreens were slowing for Wii. In Japan, FFXIII also launched, and it was in the wake of the PS3 Slim.

What I'm driving at is, $150 per Wii, with Just Dance 3, a new Mario & Sonic, and then the The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword you'd still expect a pretty good Christmas quarter for Wii. You're talking two or three 5-10m unit games and a $50 price cut - thats a pretty good push. Hell it will probably be more - especially if Square-Enix releases DQ & FF within six months again at the end of 2011 like it did in late 2009. We've also seen with DKC (4.3m shipped in a month) that the Wii base is pretty good at gathering all the people who ever liked a big series from Nintendo, and Twilight Princess sold what, 1.5m on GC? So you could still have a big influx of Zelda fans over Christmas.

So even with the heightened competition Nintendo still has some powerful third party publishers on its side with Wii (Ubisoft especially), and there is a lot of data suggesting that what Sony calls the "10 Year Plan" is really just a function of having a huge peak turn into a long tail, at least in the USA. Those are still significant advantages in pushing Wii well into the 100 million plus zone.

I base the long tail stuff on the fact that in the USA console sales ltd go : PS2 > Wii > NES / PS1 > X360 > SNES > N64 > Genesis > PS3 > Xbox > GC  for systems over 10m - and if you look at the tails, they follow that order - NES / PS1 had long tails, but not as long as PS2, GEN and SNES were behind NES / PS1, and so on.