That would mean 3 times the preorders, quite a gap...

It doesn't as we don't have access to digital sales numbers.
As usual though, I'm more interested in their next week sales and the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Not a single person I know that plays videogames preorders anything EVER. Whats the point in doing so anyway?

EDIT: I have to correct myself :)  I preordered Sonic for WiiU but just because a shop had it for 45€ and I had a 10€ voucher/coupon that would expire that day.

So I got it for 35€.  So I "preordered" it because there wont be a deal that good in the foreseable future. I dont care if it arrives a month after release or whatever.

Yeap, i preorder it for $43 because of some vouchers. Waiting to buy Pokemon on black friday or chirstmas!

That's quite normal, especially for Nintendo games.

You've answered your own question, I've bolded it for you. lol.

5.5 million is certainly possible.

Couple things you've got to bear in mind:

1) Digital game cards and eShop sales, which will account for a sizeable portion of sales, even though they won't be tracked here, and we'll only find out about it when either Iwata states figures at the quarterly briefing in a few weeks, or NoA boasts stats in next month's NPD numbers.

2) Pre-orders in no way equate to first-week sales.  The vast majority of people do not pre-order, and further, pre-orders are heavily under-tracked for certain titles. 

3) Japanese sales will make up likely more than half of the game's first week sales. So that's why first week numbers will be so large.  It's primarily thanks to Japan, as the 3DS is the premier console over there and has been for well over a year now.  However, come the Thanksgiving shopping season in the US and Europe, the western markets will begin to eat into Japan's share of sales of this game and others, and the US especially will account for a much larger proportion come the end of December.   There'll be a thread about that I'm sure, come time.

This site is becoming more and more useless data wise, because digital is becoming a much larger piece of the pie. I know eight people that bought this game and six of them ( myself included) bought the digital version, obviously thats just my expierence, but one can no longer discount digital sales.

But even so, isn't the 5.5 VGC estimate purely packaged retail?  That is extremely impressive, especially given what you're saying, if so many people opted for digital.  Whether it's because they literally couldn't get a physical copy because it was sold out, or because they opted for the convenience of digital.

I work retail gaming. We had 8 preorders for Pokemon X, and 5 for Y. We easily sold through 100 copies of the two games. Nintendo is very non aggressive when it comes to pushing preorders, and they have a large amount of younger fans who may not preorder. There are often no incentives to preorder their games unless you're legitimately concerned about them not having copies. So, yeah. It's not hard to imagine a 3,4, or even 5:1 ration from preorder to sale, especially if that includes digital sales.

Really? BW had 140mil+ user base vs 34mil user base. If its even half thats impressive, if its close to BW numbers with just 1 day sales tis means pokemon XY will have ridiculous Sales and can probably reach way over 18mil sales O.o lifetime imo