Assuming the preliminary data is indicative of the full data, I don't think anyone expected this big a drop. Of course, we'll see some fanboys doing damage control by saying it was expected, to whom I will ask to provide proof in the form of a past post about it. The point is, the drop was big in Japan.

However, I don't think the drop will be as big in the other areas. Sales in America were, relatively speaking, not as high as Japan's. Europe is the land of legs, which would make a huge drop even more surprising than Japan's.

I was actually expecting a huge drop so I'm really not surprised at all. That's what happens when you release a game which is exclusive, dedicated to the fans, from a huge franchise and extremely hyped on a console selling really poorly in the most hardcore gaming country. Most of japanese PS3 owners are Final Fantasy fans, and then there are those MGS fans. That's it.
This game combines almost all the possible factors for a huge drop.

25-45 is what most expected it to be in first week. Most of the people here expected MGS4 LTD to be 500k. The fact is MGS4 in Japan exceeded expectations of almost every one interms of HW bost and SW sales. Anyway if the final number for HW is 45k then this is great and less then 50% drop.

 But the PS3 HW won't be 45K in Japan... Expect more like 20K.

Of course they did. In fact, most people predicted the first week sales around 50k - 60k.

I think it'll be one of the biggest drops ever in Japan. If you actually compare sales to install base its already sold to a pretty huge 25% or so of the install base. It has to drop harder than hell there really unless it continues to drive a prolonged spike in console sales (which I don't think it will do personally despite best hopes of the PS3 fanboys).

US and Others I don't know. Each has a bigger install base and could support a higher level of continued sales for a while.

Whichever way you look at it though this title will soon reach a point where it will need new PS3 owners to see much continued sales vs install base.

I do think it will have long legs though as I think a fair number of future PS3 buyers will always pick it up - it'll be one of the regular purchases vs a game that total disappears IMHO.

I'll just repost what I posted in the preview comment section:

People on this site are so silly. MGS4 had awesome first week sales, comparable to when MGS3 launched on the PS2, with a userbase 8.5 times bigger than the PS3 userbase right now. I don't understand how on earth anyone expected the same amount of raw sales from the game (Close to 1 million), for a console with 8.5 times less than when MGS3 launched on the PS2. We're talking about a console with eleven percent of the install base of another. I mean, if the game got close to a million, we'd be talking about a forty or forty-five percent attach rate for this game, whereas MGS3 on the PlayStation 2 only achieved a six percent attach rate (when it launched), take into the fact what it sold compared to the overall install base in Japan, the attach rate is much worse (aruond 2-3 percent).

I mean seriously, the only people that expected "much higher" second-week sales were people who are not supportive of the PlayStation 3 or MGS4. And the replies I can see in this thread corroborate this generalization. It's a damn shame that this is going to be the story of this week from the haters, and I will be having to copy and paste this paragraph over and over, and have it fall on deaf ears... *sigh* This is going to be a long week.

I'll add that the game will obviously drop in all areas, but the biggest drop (percentage wise) will be in Japan, but I only expect 100k or so in both EU and NA.

I don't think Japan is much of a hardcore gaming country anymore

http://www.vgchartz.com/games/game.php?id=3210

OT: Next week 30k. 63% drop.

Check my post history.

 Look at the top selling games so far this year in japan http://www.vgchartz.com/japyearly.php Now that list seems to have more hardcore games than casual games.