Ouch. Ok, I think the hype campaign of TotK with 5 trailers, a 10 minute gameplay reveal, 4 years of waiting, and an amazing final trailer (included in the 5 trailers) is an excellent campaign that didn't overstay its welcome.  It's a tough sell to keep everyone at full mast for 4 years for a title, even one as hype as a Breath of the Wild sequel.  I also think that BotW does a lot of the heavy lifting for Totk's marketing campaign as a good majority of people were already saying, "Take my Money" before even seeing the first gameplay reveal.

I see that you posted two options in your post, with the low end of 30 million being the bottom end of your positive perspective.  I think there is where the part that I thought it was a joke post came in as I suppose I omitted the possibility that your actual lowest threshold was probably closer to 15-20 million based on the lackluster marketing campaign you referenced. I'll take that ats my reading comprehension fail.

Finally, I wasn't trying to be snarky.  I'm bummed that you took it that way.

While I agree that 12mil is not very realistic and myself expect a launch of at most 10mil for TotK, your last argument doesn't hold much water. Splatoon 3 and S/V sold just as high a percentage of their predecessor's LT sales or higher in Japan at their launches and quickly completely outsold their predecessors.

While TotK does not have multiplayer, which was likely a driving factor with these other two games, it's not impossible for it to sell 2M at launch in Japan.

TotK's hype is bigger than that of BotW before launch. You must be living under a rock.

Regarding Nintendo's campaign, in Japan they have TotK billboards everywhere (I've seen photos) and ads playing on TV. The Nintendo of Japan Youtube account has all of those ads and they uploaded a BotW summary video which tells you about the story and world for people who haven't played BotW but consider getting TotK.