Same thing happened last year. Everyone in here said Nintendo would not cut the price, it was not needed and would not happen. Nintendo themselves said thay they would not cut the price and that it was doing great regardless. Malstrom wrote about how Nintendo would be showing weakness if they lowered their price, talked about the high demand and how silly the people who imagined that the Wii would have its price cut, were.

Normally I would agree with you but you're forgetting one thing. Even with how unrealistic it was at the time Ninty were still shooting for 26 million that year. They didn't lower their projection to 20 million until a month later. They're already aiming low this year with 18 million. Unless that's some sort of marketing ploy and they intend to smash through it I don't see them cutting the price, especially with the recent bundling of WSR. They probably think that the current line-up is good enough to get them within eye-sight of last year's Christmas because they're going to lose a lot in the lead-up to it. And Q1 will likely be lower as well since the post-holiday momentum won't be quite as strong as this year, especially with GT5 likely sucking all the air out of EMEAA.

We don't know for sure, which was my point, but unless they're totall generating fake numbers Brett's tools should be taking most recent data (which they apparently get) and it's pretty easy (and standard) to have the algorithms skew to any major shifts immediately apparent in the data.  Hence, if SW was seeing a spike it would be in their sample data and it should be extrapolated out using their algorithm.

After all, how the heck are they picking up the HW spike?  By your logic they wouldn't have as they'd follow the previous trend.  No, if they can pick up the HW spike they can pick up a SW spike.

Besides, there's plenty of evidence there is a fair bit of re-buying.  On all major UK online sites I checked plus some stores the 360 HDD transfer kits were also spiking massively with the 360s - that has to be a re-buy, a new customer isn't going to buy a transfer kit with their brand new and only 360.  Only existing 360 owners will want a transfer kit.

Also, logically you can see from the specs that the 360s will attract re-buys.

Even a small sample of stores which is what Vgchartz likely has access to is able to give a reasonably consistant statistical sampling when you're dealing with a few SKUs of hardware. What it cannot do is give the whole story in regards to software sales. I know for a fact that Brett has admitted that much of the software under a certain level of sales is difficult to track accurately and unlike hardware we don't have shipment figures coming out every 3 months to help correct for inaccuracies. Software itself isn't consistant, it varies from region to region in regards to taste and certainly doesn't follow anything like a normal distribution like you would see more with hardware. We have seen Vgchartz out by a factor of 2:1 over data released by publishers.

Even with the increased numbers of transfer units sold, do we have an attach rate of transfer kits vs Xbox 360s sold? Its simply a guess, just as the number of consoles sold / given away would also be a guess. Noone is doubting that people are rebuying the console. The real questions are in relation to the proportion sold to current owners, the proportion of older 360s sold onto the used market or given away from the people rebuying consoles and the number of new owners buying the console along with the effects of this event on the software market for existing owners who have rebought consoles.

What im saying is that the software sales aren't accurate enough to tell us what is happening in the market. I remember the PS3 slim came out and people stated that because the software didn't seem to increase that current PS3 owners were buying the console. The same is happening here within a similar timespan. Its simply too early to cast judgement even though that is tempting in itself.

Why are people assuming that if there isn't a bump in software sales then there aren't new console owners? If I'm a new owner why should I purchase a new full priced game when I have a whole library of AAA games in the bargain bin which I haven't played? I fail to see the logic...

So, used games aren't tracked, and that explains the lack of sales spike for software, because people buy used?

Nintendo will not be able to go back to the old numbers, mainly because Wii is already 4 years old and they are already shifting resources to the 3DS and their new home console (They need to have SW ready, and they can't trust 3rd party devs). They can't do it on their own and since 3rd party devs already decided long ago that Wii was not worth their best efforts, Wii will continue to go down in sales. I'm expecting a new home console by Holiday's 2011 in Japan, with the West getting it before Q1 2012 ends.

So, used games aren't tracked, and that explains the lack of sales spike for software, because people buy used?