I recently ran figures comparing Wii, PS3, X360 to PS2 with the following caveats:

- PS2 "year one" counts as March 2000 in Japan not March 2000 - Dec 2000 to make comparing to Wii / PS3 / X360 more even.

- I only looked at the USA, Japan, and Western Europe

- Data is for Launch Windown to 5th Christmas (4th Christmas for PS3 in Europe)

Wii is almost two years ahead of PS2 in the USA, less than a year ahead in Western Europe (and it may fall behind the PS2 pace in Europe this year), and way behind in Japan.

X360 is closing in on the PS2 pace in the USA, way off the PS2 in Europe and a joke compared to PS2 in Japan.

PS3 is way off the PS2 pace in the USA and Japan but fairly close to PS2 in Western Europe.

Western Europe:

                  Year 1-4        Year 1-5

Wii               21.07m          26.93m

PS3*            16.80m         (year five is 2011)

PS2               19.15m          25.24m

X360            8.00                 11.35m

* Year one for PS3 is March 25 to Dec 2007, Year One for PS2 / Wii / X360 is one to three months. PS3 is thus at 70% of the PS2 pace in years one to four on a weekly or monthly basis.

Year one is adjusted to be one month for all three systems.

USA Years 1-5:

Wii USA = 34.18m

PS2 USA = 26.65m (32.16m in 2000-2005)

X360 USA = 18.65m (25.41m in 2005-2010)

PS3 USA = 15.44m

Wii is 20 months ahead of the PS2 pace in the USA, about six months ahead of PS2 in Europe, and 3m / 1-2 years behind in Japan. X360 is 10% of the PS2 pace in Japan in years 1-5, less than half in Western Europe, and 75-80% of the PS2 in the USA. PS3 is 40% of the PS2 pace in Japan, 58% of the PS2 pace in the USA, and 70% of the PS2 pace in Europe.

Wii will never reach 150million the system is too reliable. I am only my third PS2 atm.

Two big ones and now a slim which I got 3months ago. I knwo people who are bigger gamers than me and are onto their 5th-7th consoles for ps2.

It's ahead.... but a this rate..... it'll fall..... pretty soon

The Wii will not catch the PS2.  Those legs.....they're just too sexy.

Well, it looks like it's on track to beat it.  It only comes up short really in Japan (idk why Japan of all places).  And it's def. stronger in America by a decent amount, which probably makes up for the short comings in Japan.

I don't see any reason why Wii can't do what the PS2 has done/is doing once the generation goes away.  If the Wii is 99 bucks by the time the next gen comes then it can still be a hot seller for ppl not willing to dish out big bucks for the next gen machines.

"X360 is closing in on the PS2 pace in the USA, way off the PS2 in Europe and a joke compared to PS2 in Japan."

Your numbers show 4.06 million difference between PS2 figures and Wii figures in Japan, that's probably more like 2-3 years behind.

Except that if you look at Source data PS2 had crazy numbers in year 5 and 6 in Europe ( over 8 millions year 6) so at the current rate Wii will actually fall behind PS2 in Europe within the next 12 months..

PS2 is looking like it will outsell Wii by 3 millions or more in year 6 there..

Wii peaked year 3 there and has been going down steadly since ( year 5 was 32% off year 3). PS2 peaked in year 6 in Europe...

If I had to guess , when all said and done I would say lifetime sales of Wii will end up between 120 and 130 millions units, probably closer to 120 millions than 130...

The console hasn't been dominant enough and doesn't have a game library justifying it still selling meaningful numbers 4 years from now...

I think Wii is capable of 52-57m USA, 14-17m Japan, 35-45m Western Europe. It could be more in the USA than even 57m really - PS2 had 19m in it after selling 4.7m in 2004 the analogue year to Wii in 2010 (partly on a spike to 5.5m in 2005), and Wii sold 7.1m in 2010, and costs more than PS2 did in 2004.

So it has to have at least 20m left in the USA with price cuts and the history of higher trajectory. Throw in Canada, Latin America, Australia, South Korea, and the rest of the world and you're talking about 130m lifetime (55m USA / 5m Canada / 4m Latin America, 15m Japan, 40m Western Europe, 3m South Korea, plus Australia and so on).

I have data suggesting NES sold 80,000 units in the USA in its 10th Christmas (Dec 1994) which puts its cycle at only a year shorter than PS2 in the USA (PS2 sold 75,000 in its 11th Christmas - Dec 2010). Since Wii is bigger than NES AND PS2 in the USA you have to expect a really long tail if they price it well and continue to repackage / offer new bundles.

You all have to remember two things as well -

1) Some publishers - THQ, Ubisoft, Lucas Arts, WB Interactive - are fairly dependent on Wii now. If you look at VGC data in 2010, the third party market for Wii is actually growing still, even though SW shipments fell from 199m in Jan-Dec 2008 to 198m in Jan-Dec 2009, and to 185m in Jan-Dec 2010. If Nintendo hadn't bundled extra sw with Wii in 2010, its sw on Wii would have dropped 30% in 2010 - but the third party market didn't fall overall.

2) Wii had a monstrous Christmas in 2009 on its first price cut (put it this way, USA Wii sales in Dec 2009 were equal to 1/4 of all PS3 sales from 2006-2010 in the USA and Wii was nominally in decline by this point). By that point PS3 was half of its initial cost, Call of Duty was huge for the HD systems, and many of the evergreens were slowing for Wii. In Japan, FFXIII also launched, and it was in the wake of the PS3 Slim.

What I'm driving at is, $150 per Wii, with Just Dance 3, a new Mario & Sonic, and then the The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword you'd still expect a pretty good Christmas quarter for Wii. You're talking two or three 5-10m unit games and a $50 price cut - thats a pretty good push. Hell it will probably be more - especially if Square-Enix releases DQ & FF within six months again at the end of 2011 like it did in late 2009. We've also seen with DKC (4.3m shipped in a month) that the Wii base is pretty good at gathering all the people who ever liked a big series from Nintendo, and Twilight Princess sold what, 1.5m on GC? So you could still have a big influx of Zelda fans over Christmas.

So even with the heightened competition Nintendo still has some powerful third party publishers on its side with Wii (Ubisoft especially), and there is a lot of data suggesting that what Sony calls the "10 Year Plan" is really just a function of having a huge peak turn into a long tail, at least in the USA. Those are still significant advantages in pushing Wii well into the 100 million plus zone.

I base the long tail stuff on the fact that in the USA console sales ltd go : PS2 > Wii > NES / PS1 > X360 > SNES > N64 > Genesis > PS3 > Xbox > GC  for systems over 10m - and if you look at the tails, they follow that order - NES / PS1 had long tails, but not as long as PS2, GEN and SNES were behind NES / PS1, and so on.

~125 mil sounds about right for the Wii, as its successor is probably just around the corner.  Either being announced this year or next year, and the Wii won't see the kind of legs PS2 still saw after the release of PS3.  Even if it sells more and even reaches 150 mil (I highly doubt it will), it still wouldn't come close to the PS2's lifetime sales, as they are still selling millions of them each year.  PS2 may end up ~160-170 mil by the time all is said and done.