Will the MGS4 week two drop be the biggest in history?

[Millennium]

I think the drop will take longer in other regions, where the PS3 is more popular, but I do think it will happen within a month, just like it did on the other HD consoles.

The reason for this has less to do with a shift in game quality and more with a pecularity of the fanbases of the HD consoles this generation: a tendency to view their consoles as investments. They buy their consoles based not on what is out, but on what is coming. Halo 3, GTA4, MGS4, and FFXIII were the most commonly cited examples early in the lifetimes of these consoles. They didn't wait for these games to come out before buying the consoles: they bought them right away, and bided their time with 'filler' games with similar content (of which there were many). As a result, while these games may have sold millions of consoles between them, they sold most of them long before the games themselves were released. And so there's a spike followed by a crash, and -perhaps most importantly- no permanent increase in sales. People didn't wait, which was good for early console growth but has completely changed the idea of a 'system-seller' as we know it. In effect, the early blockbusters become vital to the growth of the system, but cannot have a measurable effect on system sales: because the sales come before the game's release, there's no way to trace them back to the game.

Even more curious than this new "investment" behavior, however, is the fact that the Wii hasn't been affected by it. Even among people who invested in HD consoles, the common behavior pattern with the Wii is still to wait until specific games have been released (MP3, SMG, and Brawl being commonly cited examples). The result of this is that the traditional 'system-seller' paradigm still works with the Wii: sales tend to go up and stay up, at least to some degree, as the big games get released.

The whole thing raises many questions. Why are the PS3 and 360 seen as investments now? Why isn't the Wii getting the same treatment from gamers? Why is it happenning now, as opposed to sooner or later (or, for that matter, ever)? How will these behavior patterns affect future sales, and future game development, on these platforms and the design philosophies behind them?