This thing is a monster - 6.6 million units sold in six months. Likely still to over a million units in the June quarter. I'm expecting it to be the highest selling third party game on a Nintendo system ever by E3 2011. The original game has not really been damaged much by the new game either - it is still selling tens of thousands per week. Given that, it seems like the inevitable Just Dance 3 might not damage Just Dance 2 too much.
With at least one more good Christmas, and an introduction to Japan coming at some point in the future there is really no way conceivably way for the game to sell less than 8 million units.
So with that in mind here are my limits:
Realistic Minimum for Just Dance 2: 8m units. It is at 6.6m currently (120k this week). I figure 300,000 in Japan. So if it declined to 100k, then 80k, then 60k, etc etc and stabilized at 5-10k or something, it might only sell 8 million units. But this game has sold 100k per week for months now - it is anything but a title that declines rapidly so even getting to "only" 8 million would be shockong.
Realistic Maximum for Just Dance 2: Wii has more competition than it used to, and game purchasing rates for users are falling each year. Nonetheless, the average Wii owner is still buying about two games per year. Roughly half of the Wii base is female - 43 million people. If you figure an 80-20 split in favor of women for Just Dance 2, roughly 18% of women that live in the West own Just Dance 2.
Even super hits rarely sell through to more than 1/3 of a console audience. If the Wii reached 130 million people, and half the audience remained female, you'd get 65 million * 1/3, or about 22 million users, plus maybe 4 million men. Those types of figures are unlikely though, as other dance games, on Kinect, and on Wii from Ubisoft at least, will eat into some of those sales. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Just Dance 2 is capable of selling to about 1 in 5 of the women who will eventually own a Wii, about 13 million people, up just a bit from the 18% penetation into female homes the game has in the West currently. With the same male / female split, that'd be a maximum of about 16.2 million.
Thus - Realistic Maximum for Just Dance 2 = 16.2m
If you split the difference, you get about 12 million units. What do you think? Is that way high? Super low?
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
