Actually, haven't John Lucas predicted 50M?

John Lucas has gone missing lately. He hasn't posted in over a month now. So we really don't have any way of knowing what he thinks. Though he did clearly over-predict Nintendo's confidence in the Wii's ability to sell like no other, as the last production hike was to 2.4m instead of his predicted 4.0m.

The point Shams made about Holiday Sales being roughly 40% of sales for a year is a very tried and true trend for just about every console, and even applies to a number of other goods outside of the gaming industry as well. In short its an extremely well established trend.

With that in mind I looked back through the '07 weekly average (by month) data and assuming seasonal trends hold up and ignoring potential outside factors we should look something like this for the rest of the year:

Note that E3 definitely imposes seasonal changes to the console data by itself, but there can still be major announcements that effect it further.

Again these are based on current sales rates modified by well-known seasonal trends (which covers seasonal titles like Madden), etc...

Funny. The projections section of my monthly-updated 2008 sales data keep coming up with similar results to that. The high end-of-year sales projections are all around 43.4m to 50.6m Wii, 23.7m to 29.1m PS3, and 26.5m to 28.6m 360, while the low end-of-year sales go between 39.5m to 43.7m Wii, 21.4m to 22.9m PS3, and 24.8m to 25.6m 360.

ya damn fucking right it will sell 40 fuckin million! bitch! yeah oh fuckin yeah it'll fuckin easily reach 40 fuckin million units or i'll fuckin buy as many wii's as it takes to reach 40 fuckin million! oh fuckin yeah baby! fuck yeah fuckin fucka! oh haha fuck fuck fuckin right!! damn fuck son get a fuckin job and get some fuckin cash and buy a fuckin wii! fuck yeah!!

Sqrl's numbers look fairly good to me. 10M+ for the holidays seems reasonable. Which would, working the other way of holiday sales being 40%, means the rest of the year is around 15M. If the shipments can be made, that is.

...38million I think.

About 1.3million per 1month.
If it keep, end of year, 36million.
But, December of Nintendo is stronger.
For me, difficult to think this.

I think I saw that thread, but I don't remember what the assumptions were there. If you're right, the error in my method would not amount to more than 0.6 million units, as that's the non-cancelled-out difference that I mention in the second paragraph of the post you just quoted (i.e. the monthly production boost).

Regarding your alternative method of working backwards from Nintendo's estimate for the fiscal year, it wouldn't surprise me if that has the same or bigger error, as they are usually conservative in their shipment forecasts.

In any case, this debate we're having is almost academic. We've had atleast three different calculation methods presented in this thread which result in the same ~45m figure; mine, yours and Sqrl's. It seems that that's the benchmark for Wii's sales at the end of 2008 (whether shipped or sold probably doesn't make a big difference so let's ignore that here).

Nintendo could still surprise us with an extra boost in production for the holiday season, but other than that 45 million seems like a good estimate.

Nintendo forcasts 49.something million by the end of March 2009
Nintendo always quotes a low number and then ups it later
There will not be over 9 million Wii's sold in Jan+Feb+Mar

Therefore the Wii will outsell 40 million by 31/12/2008

In most years, 35% to 55% of console hardware is sold from October 1st to January 31st. In the first 6 months of the year the Wii has sold (roughly) 9 Million systems, and is on pace to have sold between 21 Million and 30 Million consoles this year. This would put the Wii's total at between 39 Million and 48 Million by January 1st 2009. Personally, I think the Wii will fall somewhat in the middle of those at between 42 Million and 45 Million.