Speaking to Chris Kohler on the game_life blog at wired, George Harrison answered candidly about how successful Nintendo can be worldwide in the coming years.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/05/interview_noas_.html

"WN: In five years, where do you see the Wii? In the US.

GH: Certainly I think that as we get through this entire lifecycle, and already people are starting to guess, "who's going to win the lifecycle," two things are going to happen. First of all, I'm not sure it's going to be a typical lifecycle. In the past, we've always had five- to six-year lifecycles which were sort of forced by someone jumping ahead and using a new piece of technology. And we're finding out now that the appeal of faster processors and better graphics is really sort of reaching a diminishing point. There's a price point and there's the quality that's holding the PlayStation 3 back. They're selling so many PlayStation 2s because people are saying, "You know what? The graphics are pretty good, the price is good, and the library is good." So we have a great expectation that this lifecycle's actually going to last more than five years.

We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience. "

For comparison, Sony will likely end up selling 125 million PS2s worldwide to 24 million Xboxs, 22 million GCs, 9 million DC.

In the USA, the breakdown was more along the lines of 40 million, 17 million, 11 million, 4.5 milion - putting PS2 at 55% in the USA (and growing slightly as GC and Xbox are dead)

Given 20% market expansion in the USA to 87 million, and you begin to understand Nintendo's other claim: that it can sell 35 million Wiis in the USA (40% of 87 million is 34.8 million).  With Wii forecast to be at 20 million by March 2008, Nintendo must believe at this point that Wii can have at least NES level sales (35 million in the Americas, 15 million in Europe & Japan at least).

The most interesting point to consider is the remaining 52 million consoles sold in America.  Over 7.5 million are already split between 360 and PS3, which leaves another 45 million available spots.  With 360 in a stronger position than Xbox was, I can see the console totalling 25-35 million of the non Wii consoles sold in the Americas, leaving PS3 with 17-27 million. 

Personally, I see the market in America growing to 90 million, with 360 in the 33-37 million range, Wii in 30-34 million range, and PS3 in the 20-23 million range.

I still think this generation will be pretty even between the 3 with no one getting more than 40%, but in the short run the wii is gonna do very very well...

I was initially going to say that he is greatly underestimating the potential marketshare of the Wii, but then realised he's talking about the American console base. I still think they're going to go over 50% in the States, and definitely over that wordwide, but I suppose it's only natural to be careful when estimating the The very interesting bit here is that he believes the Wii will have an unusual lifespan, but unlike most people saying it will be longer than normal. I think it's definitely possible as casual gamers tend to not care about graphics, but we'll see. The biggest naysayers are huge fans of Sony with vested interests anyway. =P I'm honestly skeptical about the PS3 ever reaching 20 million worldwide before Sony pulls the plug, but that's not what this thread is about.

Well Nintendo has been fairly conservative lately. I suppose that's better than engaging in absurd boast fests like the other two, but it's just not as fun for us.

Nintendo prefers to make conservative estimates that way they look even better when they beat them

But, in this market, short term gains usually translate into long term gains ...

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong but if ("when") the Wii has sold 20 Million units at the end of 2007, and is very close to having outsold the PS3 and XBox 360 combined (7 Million PS3, 15 Million XBox 360) third party developers are going to support it heavily. If ("when") sales continue like they have been in 2008 and the Wii passes the combined sales of both HD systems (Wii 30 Million, PS3 10 Million, XBox 360 18 Million) why would you put your game on another platform?

add "...because people are stupid" to the title and I'd say it's plausible.

Do the mods do IP bans or just name bans?

why. do you get banned for having opinions here?

Not opinions, but if you're remarkably negative and insulting to a large group of people expect a ban ...

Unfortunately even IP bans can not actually prevent people from generating a new account.