Ya I pointed that out on the last "I can't believe Wii is still sold out" thread.
It's pretty impressive, PS2 had to hold off its release outside of Japan due to the difficulties in producing enough units.... Nintendo has doubled that rate of production and still gets shouted at.

By the way the 360 was also produced faster than the PS2 was... 10.4 million produced in just over 1 year [360 wasn't sold out like PS2/Wii though... that and 360 had quality issues, some of which may havs stemmed from overproduction?]

The problem with this thread, is that Ps2 had very big differences between launches. Japan launched 7 months before USA, so your graph is wrong. What you should do is this:

Japan Wii Vs Japan Ps2

5.0 Wii vs 4.3 Ps2 = 0.7 + Wii

Europe Wii vs Europe PS2 (not total others, Ps2 had a big difference in launches here too)

5.9 Wii vs 5.92 Ps2 = 0.02 + Ps2

Usa Wii vs Usa Ps2

8.6M wii vs 8.0 Ps2 = 0.6 + Wii.

Total: 19.5 Wii (lacks 550k of other than Europe data) vs 18.2 Ps2 = 1.3 million more Wiis than Ps2s or + 10 %

You could look at this (http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=All&cons2=PS2&reg2=All&cons3=X360&reg3=------&weeks=80&weekly=1) and see that the week nr 40 or something were Ps2 beats Wii is where Ps2 launches in USA.

You could see here (http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=All&cons2=PS2&reg2=All&cons3=X360&reg3=------&weeks=400&weekly=1) and see that Wiis average is about Ps2 average in the next 2 years.

Ps2 had sold 110M in 7 years, that is 15,7/year. In 2007 Wii did 14.5M. It is not selling twice as fast as any home console, it is selling slower than the Ps2.

Will it beat the Ps2? Yes. Because 1.8 * 4 is 7.2M and in april ish they will increase to about 2.2M * 8 = 17.6M = total of 24.8M and later on for the next 5 years 26 ish in average and end at 26* 8 = 130M + 20M = 150M = 25 ish more than Ps2.

Sum up: straight facts: it is not selling as fast as PS2 at current rate.

This is the part where you are mistaken actually. I assume you took this number from our 2007 fiscal year reports, which would actually solve everything. You see the 14,5 million is how much Nintendo shipped for the first 3 quarters of this fiscal year. If you were to count how many wiis were actually sold from January 1st till December 31st the number would be some 16 million i think. Anyway you understand what's wrong with your analysis right?

One thing you need to remember is that the Japanese by nature are not risk takers. Their culture is very conservative. Nintendo as whole proves to fit this mold.

Now Americans on the other hand are very "risky"

A perfect comparison is

Microsoft and Nintendo

Would Nintendo be throwing money to the wind like MS is on the Xbox(and 360)... I highly doupt it... In fact it is their conservative nature that most likely led to the Wii. I believe we will see a major increase in Wii production for the Next 4 quarters(so many big games), then Nintendo may drop it back to where it is now.... That is unless WiiFit become the next Brain Training esque monster. If that is the case we may be looking at JL type numbers the next few years.

yes i think you are right,ninty did a good choice and didnt have control issues

 I don't think that really matters at all! It's Sony's fault that they couldn't launch the PS3 earlier like in Japan.

"That's Sony's issue, not my problem." Reggie Fils-Aime on the PSP, E3 05.

Ok I understand the angle you're taking here. Basically you are saying that the staggered launch makes it look like the Wii is ahead because it was only competing against PS2 data for 1 or 2 regions during the early portions of its lifetime.

The problem is that taking those regions and re-aligning them to create a new set of launch data is the same as if someone were to try and account for all the Wiis that would have been sold had it not been supply constrained. The reason the PS2 was not launched in EU, and US right away is because it was not ready in terms of supply to do so. So going back and aligning launches and saying "These are the real numbers" is really only a best case scenario. It says "What if there were never supply" issues, and a valid counterpoint for comparison with the Wii would be if it were not supply constrained what would it have sold?

Bottom line is that the launch was staggered for a reason. The same reason the Wii has been sold out for over year actually.

 The problem with your analysis is that it assumes that if Sony was able to launch the PS2 nearly simultaneously as the Wii was, that Sony would have no production issues with it, and all the PS2s produced 7 months after Japan for America would be available at the same time as it was in Japan for America, and similar to with the Europe and other than Europe launches.  

If Nintendo had waited 3 months to launch Europe and others, like the PS3 did, there would have had been another 1.2M Wiis available to sell in Japan and America.  Which, I believe, would have sold.

If Nintendo had waited 7 months to launch Europe and others, like the PS2 did between the Japan and American launch, there would have had been another 2.3M Wiis available to sell in Japan and America.  Which, I believe, also would have sold in that time frame.

But we won't know for sure if the Wii would have sold that 2.3M in Japan and America, any more than we won't know if the PS2 could have done a simultaneous launch. 

So, what's left?  IMO, which one for full year to year sales, on average, has the better sales.  As you noted, PS2 is 15.7M a year.  The Wii's full sales for 2007 was 16.1M.  By a very slim margin, Wii wins the first year.  6 more years to go. 

If the current 1.8M sells out over that time period, not to mention any raises in production, the Wii will beat out the PS2.  We'll see.

Wii > PS2

edit: nm,