Well Mario Kart, Pikmin, 3D mario, Wind Waker, The Wonderful 101 and maybe Smash Bros are all coming this fiscal year so I can understand why it is so high...It still might be too high though.

Why don't they just make lower estimates so investors will think they are surpassing their targets all the time instead of falling short?

The GameCube had a pretty strong second fiscal year though in terms of software. Metroid Prime, Super Mario Sunshine, Zelda: The Wind Waker, Animal Crossing were all released and the GameCube had a price drop to $149.99 and a promotion of a free game thrown in as well if I recall correctly. 

That's pretty interesting to look at all those consoles though. Look at the Playstation 1 just take off like a rocket and the NES too. Cool stuff.

It is indeed cool stuff! 

And while the GC had a good lineup, It only sold 5.76 million consoles that fiscal year. Meaning that Nintendos projection is virtually unmissable. With 6 million Wii Us shipped over the next 12 months - which would be absolutely abysmal, and near a worst case scenario -  it still has a good chance of meeting the software projection. 

I really cannot see any realistic scenario in which they have to lower the software projection. It's pretty much as pessimistic as it could be. They're bound to meet - and likely to significantly  exceed - it. 

Before we get too carried away though we should probably also remember as of right now it's selling slower than the GameCube, even with a Mario game and without the harsh direct competetion the GCN was up again (had to go toe-to-toe vs the XBox/Halo launch and the PS2's second year was when it went into beast mode).

So there's no gauruntee it that beats the GameCube's second year.

I tend to agree though that it will beat the GameCube's second year, but come up short of the N64's second year (9+ million). Probably it will be a lot like the XBox 360's second year -- 7.7 million. That's my guess.

And beat the PS4 and maybe even the next xbox? No matter how aggressive they are, considering how inferior their hardware is, they have lost a window of opportunity they needed to capitalise on.

It will depend on bundles, 1st party and 3rd party titles.
They can bundle the Basic pack with a game; Pikmin 3, Yoshi, Zelda WW, Mario, Mario Kart, SSB will sell a lot of copies along with the big 3rd party titles. Not to forget the the digital push with indie games (VC games count?).

I'd like to see a price drop of the 32GB model to $269.99 with Nintendo Land and maybe some kind of promotion through the end of the year that if you buy a Wii U you get a free download of Zelda: The Wind Waker Reborn on top of that.

That should get some systems rolling, then perhaps a Black Friday-holiday specific bundle that has NSMBU instead of Nintendo Land in the box.

They need to get the price down, so hopefully component prices have been dropping for them the last few months and the favorable yen makes it possible. If you're charging $300+ you have to have a system that appeals to the dudebros/young male gamer crowd and the Wii U definitely is not that, they need to price it as a viable secondary console/family-kids console.

Ninetndo has sorta backed themselves into a corner with the design of the machine, so they have to embrace it now for what it is and try to sell it as such. It's not a "premium/high-end console" and needs to be much cheaper.

I really doubt that they'll hit those hardware targets either. If we only saw something like 400k in hardware globally last quarter, despite Dragon Quest, MH3U and Lego City coming out, I expect to see more of the same--if not worse--over the next few months. I don't expect either Wonderful 101 or Bayonetta 2 to be big system pushers, whether they are released on schedule or not.

I'm also assuming that they aren't going to be doing a really big price drop on the hardware either. At most, I expect them to drop the price of both models by $50 and let the Basic die off on it's own. I doubt they'd want to put themselves in the red again when they've already had big losses recently as it is. Between those two factors, there's simply too much slack for the holiday releases to pick up.

That's kind of the crappy thing, is Nintendo has basically handicapped themselves this year with the Wii U by basically writing off April-July entirely, so they have to sell everything between August-March 13/14. Not impossible, but it makes everything that much harder.

It's like having to only 2 days to study for a big exam instead of 3.

They better hope franchise fatigue isn't setting in a bit with Mario Kart. I loves me some Mario Kart, but even I have to admit, with Mario Kart 7 the franchise is starting to feel a little stale. In a lot of ways I think the fact that the GameCube was such a relatively failure helped "freshen" Nintendo's franchise roster to some extent, because a lot of people hadn't played those franchises since the SNES/N64 days (or maybe even NES days in the case of 2D Mario), and had built up an apetite for it.

It's not only the 38M for wii U software, but the 80M for 3ds software......