My belief is every bit as likely as the Wii selling between 240 and 500 million, and most people know it...

I got a John Lucas type prediction in the offing for you all:

'Once the Wii finally outsells the PS2 LTD totals there will still be people complaining that it is gimmicky and a fad.'

You can quote me in your sig if you strongly disagree with either the Wii selling more than PS2 lifetime or people still complaining about it being a gimmick/fad.

The former is likely because:

1. Consoles tend to either do much better in the second and successive years than the first (due to supply constraint at launch) and be very successful or do similar numbers in the second year and decline. Given its first year sales with continued sellout in NA Wii is a shoe-in for the former whereas X360 seems to be selling only a little bit more in 07 than it did in 06 and will probably decline either in 08 or, more likely, in 09 (but will still sell more than xbox). PS3 I cannot tell yet because the 40GB launched too close to Xmas so it could still go either way.

2. Wii is still supply constrained in NA but despite that sold more than 14 millions in its first year and started its second year with a bang of about 400k sold in one week in one territory. With current production rates Nintendo will produce 1.8*12 = 21.6M consoles in its second year. Multiply this by 5 years and add a million or two stockpiled from the first year for the Xmas season at the beginning of the second year and you get 109-110M sold in years 2-6 IF Nintendo doesn't increase production again in the next 5 years. Add in the 14M of the first year and the Wii will have sold more in 6 years than the PS2 in 7.5 years at a bare minimum.

And if you don't believe that Nintendo can sell all of those if it produces them even after seeing the Wii's first year performance consider what is needed for a console to be successful:

It needs to create a virtuous circle between number of games released (quality is secondary as with a higher number of games you need a smaller percentage of them to be high quality to have as many or more high quality games as your competition, like the PS2 and its endless stream of shovelware punctuated with great games for example) and hardware sales momentum.

NES didn't have any early competition so it got all the early games and thus all the early momentum and by the time SMS was out NES was too far ahead for it to be serious competition.

SNES had the games from the NES and got a lot of momentum but due both to a late launch against the Genesis and a smaller lifespan than NES due to the release of 32-bit consoles it didn't sell quite as much.

PS1 didn't have sales momentum to start with but Nintendo fucked up both by sticking with Cartridges and with 3rd Party so it got a lot of games (Ridge Racer, Tekken, GT, RE, FF) early enough to create sales momentum before the N64 could get a foothold.

PS2 had good momentum from the start against Dreamcast and got games (MGS2, FFX and especially GTA3) that kickstarted the virtuous circle before and soon after the two remaining competitors launched.

This generation nis closer to the SNES in that there is a strong competitor that launched a year earlier and managed to get a good foothold of games and sales (like the Genesis and unlike the Dreamcast) but despite that the Wii got THE game of this gen early (and bundled with most of the consoles too) which displayed the capability of the hardware motion-sensing wise and kickstarted sales from launch (I should say firestarted them).

These sales have made a lot of 3rd Party develop for it seriously when they thought it would be an afterthought, which will provide games in 08 and beyond (it's already starting and that's on top of Nintendo's games that is, which provides a minimum of great games on the console until 3rd party get their ass in gear to release quality games) thus feeding the circle as when these in-development games come out they each will add to the desirability of the system and sustain its high sales in the coming years.

Wii being less powerful than 360/PS3 is going to be as irrelevant as PS2 being less powerful than GC/Xbox when 3rd party start paying as much or more attention to the Wii version as they do to the other version.

As a Gamecube owner there were a lot of multiplatform games that suffered from being developed on the PS2 first and the ported to GC/XBox without using their whole capabilities because the extra development cost was not worth it given the smaller userbase and I am afraid that 360/PS3 owners are at the wrong end of the stick this gen (but less so because Wii did not launch one year before the others so it will take longer for its install base to dwarf the others so their install base will be bigger and thus the situation better for them).

And it's hypocritical complaining about the Wii dragging the technical quality of games down with its lower spec if you only owned a PS/PS2 in the last 2 gensas they did the same in their respective gens (if you had a GC/Xbox/N64 or 3DO and bashed the PS/PS2 then feel free to bash the Wii specs*).

* I wonder how many 3DO "owners" will come out of the woodwork ;)

Everyone I know who has purchased a Wii no longer plays it. It is safe to say this has probably happened with a decent percentage of owners, probably the more "hardcore" crowd who got it as a second console, as sales of a lot of really good games keep disappointing. I know its cheaper to make games for the thing, so obviously devs dont need to sell the number of units they would for 360/PS3 to make a profit, but it is quite clear that big titles just don't sell like they should on the Wii. Obviously the more systems they sell, the more this should change, and I expect some of the underperforming titles to have long legs deeper into the consoles lifetime.

Personally, for me, when I played the Wii, it was quite a bit of fun at first. Although I must admit that the excitement of this new style of video gaming wore off rather quickly, as it has with everyone else I know, like I said. I am still debating getting one, mainly for SMG and Mario Kart, as those two games would be enough to warrant a purchase for me, there just isn't much else that appeals to me, or my friends, in the near future.

My opinoin: The Wii hopeful will be underwhelmed by the beginning of 09, when it comes to hardware and software sales. 60 million, not a chance by the end of 08, and supply will have absolutely NOTHING to do with it. That is all.

Nintendo is the only company with the BALLS to fight the uphill battle of creating new markets as opposed to fighting over old ones, and you guys are mad?  Do you understand how big a company's BALLS have to be to completely disregard HD graphics and horsepower and say that a small but decent jump from last gen is good enough?  Do you understand how big a company's BALLS have to be to tell people that the old way of controlling games (which Nintendo invented) is old and busted and needs rejuvenating with ridiculous new waggle magic?

Look, if you don't like the games or the graphics, that's subjective and we can't argue there, but you absolutely have to respect the size of Nintendo's BALLS in this situation.  And expanding the market is good no matter how you slice it.

You don't win console wars with graphics.  You win them with games and BALLS, and Nintendo has both in spades.  I'm predicting a Nintendo landslide.  This industry doesn't leave room for 2-way or 3-way ties.

Wow, you got something else on your mind right now rubang? It would appear so...

 Afraid not, if anything the number of titles coming for the Wii is growing as will the sales, sorry but those more hardcore gamers are getting washed away by the flood, nongamer fare is selling great and will continue to do so, and the Wii momentum will only grow as the library continues to outpace that of its competitiors

When an item is supply constrained, its very hard to determine by how much. No one knows for sure how big or small the Wii demand really is, its impossible to judge whether it lacks wares for 10 million or 50 million customers, but people still pick only the topmost possible numbers!
As for what Avinash said about market turnarounds; Sony sure turned things around with their Playstation in '95, and almost every "expert" on the planet said that the 360 would win this gen easily simply because it was out first like the PS2 had been.
This, however, was not the case, and what does that teach us about speaking too soon and too unabashedly?
The console market is not as predictable as we like to believe at times, and quite frankly I find the insane Wii predictions rather naive...

I think the PS3 is a fad...

don´t get me wrong it is a great console and it was fun to play it for about 5 hours. I played Resistance and it was a great game but when I finished it there was nothing to play anymore and I got bored...


See the logic, guys? Every PS3 owner would tell me to buy just ANOTHER GAME, god damn!

When you get bored of a wii game buy a new game.

Consoles are based on games not their hardware. The games are a fad not the console itself. As soon as the Wii Sports fad is over there is the Super Mario Galaxy fad, the Trauma Center fad, the Metroid Fad... you get the point.

If you look at the PS3 with just one game, does it really look like a great console? Why don´t people say the Xbox 360 is a fad because there is just Halo to play? Well, because there are more games.

Hell, people, its annyoing. Buy games for your console. Every game gets boring after some time.

Is it so hard to realize the games are the "fad" and not the console? If Halo sells like crazy for 4 months and then dropps of the charts isn´t that the exact definition of "fad"?

Aren´t 99% of our games fads as they sell for some weeks and then drop out of the Top 10?

Isn´t Wii Sports, a title that sold for over a year now, the exact opposite of a fad?

The fact of the matter is however, that a large portion of Wii owners are people who get drawn in by Wii Sports and the pretty adverts, the casual group. After playing Wii sports for hours, when they have friends round, they put the Wii down and dont know what to do with it. It gets forgotten, and eventually, will be completely forgotten. Thats why its a fad.

On the whole it wont be a fad, because alot of people who have a Wii are your regular/hardcore gamers who bought it for Metroid, Zelda, Mario etc, I just dont expect the Wii to last that long because alot of people want one because its the next cool thing to have.