@FilaBrasileiro - The Wii is the only system with a remote chance:)

It should get close, but not quite. I would suspect 19 tops. More realistically, 17.5 to 18 million.  Love to be proven wrong though.

if they had the stock to, they could do more than 20 million. i just dont think they can produce that many consoles by the holidays.

@Sri Lumpa

Kudos for that excellent post.

Nintendo's biggest problem is that they don't produce enough consoles (and Wiimotes!!!). I guess they'll reach to 17m. At least at the FNAC in my city, wii's have already sold out.

@ArtofAngels:

Thanks, it takes a while to do that kind of post though. I also have an idea to fairly compare attach rates between consoles sold at different times (like 360 and Wii) which I believe might be quite insightful but it would take even more time to research it and I don't know if I will have it until next year.

Plus there are already a lot of good analysis on this site so often by the time I see a thread there is not much more I can contribute so i mostly lurk but enjoy the site quite a bit.

edit: also my analysis rests on 3 things:

1. That VGChartz is not massively off since the last quarterly report. 

2. That the production increase happened around the beginning of August.

3. That Nintendo was not able to significantly stockpile when they were producing at 1.2 millions units a months. I did not go back that far in my analysis as it would take even more time to do it and I do not believe that they stockpiled any significant amount of units back then (i.e. they really started stockpiling for Xmas when they increased production to 1.8M a month).

Nice stuff Sri Lumpa, kind of confirms my 18.5 million minimum (i am quite sure they have more stockpiled than we know of, i think they bumped up production twice if i remember...Once to about 1.5 million then a few months later to 1.8

so i guess an extra 500k at least stockpiled from before they were producing 1.8mln. (then +/- 500k discrepancy)

Nice post Sri Lumpa.

Anyhoot, I see 19 million easily.

I think Nintendo needs Wii Fit to take off in Japan to get the last million though.

Nice post Sri Lumpa. One remark - according to Nintendo, it takes 20 days to get produced consoles to store shelves (speaking of USA I assume), not 6 weeks - 10 days trip by boat plus 10 days for distribution.

However, I imagine that if Nintendo really wants to make an extra "emergency shipment" they can use air freight too.

I'm still thinking the Wii will end up somewhere between 17-18 million by the end of 2008. If they had the stock, it would be possible to get close to 20 million, but they just don't have the number of consoles to really push out 5 million in just 5 weeks. Best case scenario is 3 million sold from black friday week to end of Xmas.