S/S sold 86k btw.

I've played GT 2 when i was 13 and finished most of that game and got the best cars in the game. It was fun for a while, but got dull when i was nearly finished :) The game's learning curve isn't that bad... i could learn to play it in an hour of playing and i'd get used to it. It isnt as hard as u say it is.

Yeah.  It's hard to play most racing games after you've played Mario Kart.  Mario Kart's responsible for single handedly destroying that genre. 

Heck, Nintendo's own racers like Donkey Kong Barrel Blast and Excitebots: Trick Racing don't sell worth a darn.

btw... what happend to modnation racers? wasn't it the next big thing?

Bombed pretty hard while making fun of MKWii...?

You talking about Blur? :D!

I bought modnation, and loved it

I'm not a car nut by any stretch of the imagination and I will buy GT5 when I would never touch an FPS or sports game,  I'm not even a huge racer fan but I started buying a few because they are good social games ((splitscreen etc, i normally buy RPG's which suffice to say are not) and GT is just one of 'those' franchises that pulls casual dabblers in the genre like myself)

I have never found the Gt learning curve to be bad at all, its harder than a game like mariokart, but its not hard, even modnation may be harder to learn imo

Didn't IGN also predict that mass effect 2 would outsell FF13 worldwide? I may be wrong but I am pretty sure it was them, Personally I wouldn't put too much credence on anything IGN says about games that have their main user bases outside america (No offense intended toward America in any way, just suggesting that IGN is myopic toward America)  I don't care for IGN opinion at all, in fact I generally find myself in the group that does things (or rates games) quite opposite to what they say, GT5 being a case in point.

The market that buys Mario Kart is mainly, vastly different to the market that buys a lot of HD Racing Games. You are assuming that millions of people:

a) Own a Wii and HD console

b) Prefer the Wii

c) And mainly race on Mario Kart

Not a chance.

I think the problem is that racing gamers have either been consumed by the many FPS games this generation, or are being smarter with their money and buying only the premium titles.

How is Blur a franchise?

:/

I can guarantee you there are millions of people who are all of the above. probably 2-3 million. 72 million Wii owners out there, 30% of which own a HD console (multiconsole ownership statistics that came up here before)
 and 22.5 million of those Wii owners bought Mario Kart, and Mario Kart is a very heavily played game going by the Nintendo channel statistics. So, assuming no particular alignments of taste, 30% * 22.5 million Mario Kart Wii owners  = over 6.5 million. In practice alignments of taste will reduce that, but it'll still unlikely to be any less than "millions" who are precisely what you said above.

:p