It's completely out of the question for it to sell "terribly" at this point. 500,000 copies is guaranteed. I don't expect a huge first week a la MGS4, simply because it's not a sequel to something, but I think it'll do a few hundred thousand without much trouble. My conservative estimate for lifetime sales is 4 million. Yeah, I went there.
Everyone in this thread is trying to base the game and its sales on some previous title: Viva Pinata, Mario, Okami, Ratchet & Clank, MGS4. The fact is that not everything is predicted by what came before it. That's why you guys (I mean the generic "you," those who thought like you, not necessarily you specifically) were calling doom and gloom for the Wii before it came out because the N64 and GC did poorly, and this was just a less powerful (relatively) and more expensive version of those. Meanwhile, those of us who saw that the Wii was something genuinely new and exciting were predicting big things for it from the start, though I don't imagine any of us knew it would be quite this big.
I get that same feeling from LBP. You can't break it down into its component parts and construct its sales. It's a platformer, but it's nothing like any platformer that we've ever seen. People like me who are bored silly of platformers are pumped about it. It's got a "cute" art style, but it's a whole new kind of hyper-realistic cute, not Nintendo-cute. It's a level-editing game, but with a far more enthralling level editor than we've seen before. It's the combination of a lot of things that are driving a massive level of hype. And the hype alone is reason enough that the game shouldn't be spoken in the same sentence with something like Okami, Ratchet & Clank, or Viva Pinata.
Do this, and the game will sell like crazy.
Here's another good point. I see the sackboy becoming the new Sony mascot. If they play it right, he could carry them a long way. Rather than just selling these download packs, Sony could package the other games themselves with the content, or with codes to download it for free. Buy God of War and get the GoW content pack in LBP. It would be a brilliant way to promote both games.
