Definitely too low. The Wii U should at least reach 60 M. Though, I do agree that it won't be as big as the Wii was. I also feel it'll suffer the same fate as the Wii concerning 3rd parties. They'll support it at first, porting games from the PS3 and 360, but it's going to lose a lot of that support once the PS4 and NeXbox comes out and developers don't want to spend extra money and time making 2 graphical versions of the same games. That, plus the fact the Wii U isn't as easily approachable and simplistic as the Wii for casuals, and it will lead to fewer sales.

yeah but strong preorders and early sales are what help create buzz and gets you on the news. people see news reports with people queing and bam, they want one too. Create the illusion of popularity/demand and the jobs 3 quarters done.

I don't think it will sell less than 50 million considering Nintendo's effort to regain some core game support from 3rd parties. Plus they have their great casual games support. Mario games should push the consoles to 40 million, then you have those core games.

The Wii U is most likely looking at a 1,5 year headstart. If Nintendo does things really right, they can become the base version, like the xbox360 is today for multiplatform games. A similar thing happened with the PS2, although its scale of dominence can't be repeated.

The difference between the WiiU and other consoles will be far smaller. It will not be the same like the Wii.

Not going to happen. Too much power difference between WiiU and the next hardware generation. You won't have a portable graphic engine for high end games (next UnrealE,CryE etc.).

A year headstart only means something if you have similar platforms. PS2 and XBOX , PS3 and XBOX360 were similar, yes xbox1 was more powerfull than PS2 but they played in the same league.  WiiU is in the same category as PS3 and X360.

To much of a difference? How powerfull do you think the other consoles will get? Sony is financially exhausted and Microsoft wants to consolidate their mediacenter dream with the next xbox.

About the no scalability. Even the graphic pushers of EPIC GAMES  say its scalable.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/unreal_engine_4_games_could_be_ported_to_wii_u_epic.html

Depending on "casuals" I'd say 40-50 mils, maybe even lower if it turns out that next-gen engines can't be downscaled so easily to Wii U (and seeing how all those developers are asking for LOT of memory in next-gen consoles (Epic, Square - Crytek even asked for 8GB as minimum), it seems that may be the case). To be honest, though I prefer Sony over Microsoft, my opinion is that NextBox is gonna kill in next generation, and I just don't see Nintendo repeating Wii success.

It will be a big difference, as much as the difference between wii and PS360, that is the general consensus among develpers (and some of those developers may have inside informations). Beside it is common sense. Microsoft and Sony don't need a new console to compete with the wiiU in terms of graphic power, so why should they invest in a new product if that doesn't mean a big leap in performace?

Maybe it could be scaled, everything could be, but it won't because it would mean to kill is purpose. They make a new engine to use features that the wiiU doesn't support. To scale it mean to chop out al the improvements and make something useful only to fork out donwgraded crappy ports. It would only be a commercial operation, but in the hardcore market those kind of operations aren't very profitable. If we were talking about casual games it could make sense, but that's not what I'm refering to.

If Miiverse and Nintendo TVii take off, then I think they can outsell even the first Wii at 100 million+. I was skeptical (and still am to an extent), but if these two features are properly implimented, they could be bigger than any game and dramatically broaden the demographics for a Wii U. 

The lower end I'm now thinking is 45-55 million.

What general consensus? Where? Who? How can you have a general consensus when none of the new consoles are announced? No developer can even talk about it or any features before its announced - if they have the new console already.

bolded: They have done that for most of the PC ports for multi platform games. When you play a pc version, you get a an optimized xbox version with high textures. If they do that at this point, why don't they object now?