I just read this: http://www.xe360.com/article/Halo_3/3837.html

Is it really feasible?

If that has any truth to it, the Wii might pass the 360 before halo comes out, but by friggin god, the 360 will walk all over it for the holiday months.

(what I mean is there will be many many many million consoles bought during that period) 

...while both the Wii and the Xbox360 continue their gang-rape of the PS3! 

ofcourse, this shit is real. Look what halo 1 and 2 sold. Most of these people have a 360 for halo 3, and want it on first day, pretty plausible.

 "Many of Gamestop’s employees believe that a large portion of the preorders are being made by consumers that don’t even own a Xbox 360, that are just waiting for the price of the system to go down. "

Don't really understand what the employees base that on, but if it's true, MS better "flood the channel" before christmas :P

Of course its possible - but this is retail preorders (right?) not consumer preorders (not sure if there is a preorder program so early?). Its going to have to sell a lot more than this to "move" 360 hardware - if 1 in 3 current 360 owners by Halo3, that's almost 4m sales right there.

They are clearly talking about preorders, not retail.

4 Million preorders seems unrealistically high ... it would mean that (roughly) 2/3 of people who bought Halo 2 would have pre-ordered Halo 3 which doesn't seem reasonable to me ...

Wouldn't surprise me, but I'd suggest half that number is a realistic goal.

I would assume that, by the article, that it means that there are actually at or near 4m preorders for H3 at the stores, as an indication of what consumer preorders are, and what they expect.

Is this possible? Absolutely. Halo 2 sold 3 million units in November, and another 1.5+ in December of 2004, with MS stating only 1.5m units were preordered by retailers. Now, what matter is if all of those 4m preorders follow through? I would assume that in November, about 5m unit sales is the max theoretically possible if it comes out in November.

How is it possible? Price drop, HUGE tier ratios, and it's the first Halo for the system. Halo was a launch title, H2 owners had to only wait 3 years for H2 (although the vast majority of sales were slow for H1, therefore not the uber-fanbase that h2 to h3 has).

For the majority of the Halo 2 owners (which bought 75% of the copies in November and December in 04), they've had to wait a friggin' long time. What could this game see sales wise? I would say 6m in the US is the lowest number possible.

It has been on gamestats.com's #1 list for nearly a year, with only a few titles such as Gears of War and Zelda:TP ever dethroning it, and only for a few days.

 I say 8.5m units in the US, and another 6.5m in Europe and Japan. This should with GTAIV and LO, move 6 million hardware units this Nov-Dec. Can MS supply enough units? Of course! They've had nearly 2 years to work with manufacturers. Once the price drop hits, they will have ramped up for it already. Heck, just because MS shipped 500k units this quarter doesn't mean that they didn't make more. It could be possible that the reason MS lost so much money is that they made an additional 500k or 1m units to hold back for later this year. Don't believe its possible? MS only shipped 900k in the pre-holiday quarter, only to ship out 4.4m units in October through December.