In responce to the "worst prediction ever" thread... The "worst predictions ever" are not made by Joe Shmoe in an internet forum somewhere... Its worse when a person is a professional market analyst who has spent months compiling data and written a hundred page report and comes up with predictions like this:

http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=16280

^^^This thread logs tons of professional analyst predictions for next-gen hardware sales, dating back to at least July 2005. Reports that old can't be expected to be accurate, but to see just how bad the predictions remain after everything that has unfolded over the past 2 years... Its kind of shocking...

Analysts are bad at their job.

Sony PS3 - 121.8 million (61%): only 118 million to go

 We should hold a competition....first person to find an article from a 'professional' from before the Wii was launched that predicted at this stage it would have this level of sales wins a prize!!

It must be great to get paid for making up numbers and then being able to say 'well we didn't account for X factor' when they are incorrect.

No one had Wii that high before it launched. Of all the predictions I saw, the best was around 25% at the end.

However, I did post last year, even before E3's PS3 599.98 announcement, that the PS3 would suffer significant cutbacks, and the 360/Wii would take it's place. I had the Wii @ 47.5 to 52.5m 14 mo ago.

Too bad the MS deletes the threads after a year :(

We should start collecting users' predictions. I know I'll find it amusing to look at Crazzyman's predictions at the end of the year (for example "5 million PS3 sold during the holiday season").

Thats why we did the worldwide h/w prediction league a few months back.....We have over 100 users predictions already locked & catalogued.

Unfortunately I was not here at that time... It would be cool if a new one was done now, to see how peoples' opinion changed since then.

Stickball the worldwide prediction league averages are way high for 360 and Wii..Did people put in ridiculous numbers or is there an error?  No way both will be in the 30,000,000 range by year end.

I think I was going through the predictions once and saw at least one person who had an insanely high number (in the billions) for the Wii. There are also peope who seem to have reasonable numbers, except they input them in millions and not in units (ie writing 13 instead of 13,000,000).

EDIT - here is an example of stupid numbers:

http://www.vgchartz.com/predictions/entry.php?id=1013

EDIT2 - a nice way to handle this would be to first calculate the average for all the entries, and then calculate it again but ignoring numbers with a standard deviation which is too high.

The problem with these predictions (besides being wrong) is that they essentially rely on past trends to predict the future. There is no way to reliably predict the change a system like the Wii can have on the market, or how a $600 console will impact what was the industry leader.

I think they would be better off paying TheSource for his predictions