Traditionally rail shooters don't make huge numbers on consoles.  They're really popular in the arcade, but they don't translate to consoles that well and don't perform great in sales.  There's a reason why there isn't a ton of rail shooters for consoles compared to FPS, or fighters for example.  Now given that the Wii can manage great shooter controls out of the box without buying a light gun, I would expect a rail shooter on the Wii to perform better there than on any other console.  Still, 100k on the first day about twice what I would have expected.  Especially in Japan.  Also, in regards to Dynasty Warriors and such, you have to keep in mind that while UC is a RE game, it's an offshoot.  If it were part of the main series, like Dynasty Warriors, CoD4, GH3 and others are, then that number wouldn't be suprising at all.  Well, actually it would be, suprisingly low.  I'd like to see sales numbers of console rail shooters.  I'd be suprised if there were more than two or three that had lifetime sales over 1 million.  RE: UC could possibly go over 1 million if the first day number is accurate.

Edit:  Great minds think alike ^ 

If that's the case... I think they stopped making non-casual games around the SNES/PS1.

I think that's related to the cultural difference in popularity for game genres.  Mario platformers have all done poorly in Japan, and if you look at competing sales like R&C, they're terrible (11k opening week).

It's odd that an on rails shooter would do so well but FPS/TPS games would do so poorly, though. 

wow, 100k on one day ? thats just HUGE

With red steel, RE4, Manhunt 2 and now RE:UC doing over expectations, we have good proof that Wii is a great console for mature games sales-wise.

However i doubt that 100k number... that just seems too much, but we'll see soon.

I'll wait and see if this is Day 1 sales or a shipment number or something.

Would be amazing if true. Someone in this thread said Capcom expected 600K for this game; I thought the number was closer to 800K. Either way, >300K lifetime in Japan should hopefully lead to >1M WW.

Well House of the Dead 2 sold like... 116,000 first week on Dreamcast if i'm reading the charts right.

It dropped off hard however to 30K.

So even if these sales are true... you might be looking at some mega dropoff.

If the sales are true, Capcom must be pleased. Even with a sharp drop-off, 100K for a third-party Wii game in Japan is quite good.

I feel the same way sometimes. It's hard to take people who only play FPS games with 5 second attention spans and call themselves "hardcore gamers" seriously when I've just played heavy strategy games (Hearts of Iron, Master of Orion 3 etc), text-based adventure games and Roguelikes.

I suppose the main difference is that "hardcore" games are designed to appeal to the existing gaming audience, and "casual" games are designed to attract people who've never played games before. I suppose this would mean that in the N64/PS1 era it was Nintendo who had "hardcore" games, the kind of games that were the standard back then, while Sony made a new breed of "casual" games that appealed to the regular Joe, and most importantly managed to make a sizable portion of the population think games were "cool" all of a sudden. 

From what I've heard, Atari fans thought the NES was a piece of crap as well when it came out, but we all know how that ended. 

There are probably better (and less loaded) terms for this than hardcore and casual, but I'm not a native speaker of English per se, and therefore get to cop out of this by saying they're the best I can think of. =P 

 And 100k in first-day when RE4 sold 125k LTD is... awesome

@bdbdbd & Nighteyes 1981

First, while you're right UC isen't a "main serie" game, it still belongs to a very popular franchise and, don't forget it, isen't the first rail shooter in the RE univers.
IF you check various website, you'll see UC get a huge cover, far greater than RE5 on which infos remain scarce.

Beyond that, you're saying rail shooter don't perform well on console. Are you sure of that ?
We might lack some recent datas but House of the Dead 2 on DC did 260k, in japan only. Time Crisis 300k in japan only.

Beyond what might be considered as my biaised opinion, just ask yourself this :

- If this genre is not really popular, will Namco invest in a new Time Crisis and guncon ?

- If this genre is not really popular, why Konami would have shipped on retailers shelves more than 100 000 copies of UC (once again if the initial figure is real) for day one ?

Because to me, it would be a proof that Konami has high expectations on this title, on this genre, and do not consider it as a mere "cash in". So 100k would not be that surprising.