You don't have to buy all the instruments though. The game is designed so that you can play with the guitar alone. You don't even have to buy a new guitar, the old ones will work minus the slider.

I knew that, but it could cause a lot of confusion for potential buyers. Casual gamers might judge the price of a game on the first package they see.

I think it's really up in the air between the 360 and Wii for which will sell the most in the first week. You've got the 360 which is huge for front loaded/first week sales, and the Wii which is known for keeping games in the top 50 for months.

Guitar hero is still very much an American game, and the Wii's lead in North America is 'only' 2 million right now. Installed base won't be as huge a factor as it is for other games. Last year Guitar Hero III 360 sales dwarfed the Wii's first week with 658k to 271k. So I'll say....

360: 600k
Wii: 550k
PS3: 300k

Well I did my first week and until end of the year off America only and then realized it and put up LT for all but yea. 

But it's really hard to judge right now because usually you can get a sense of hype but hard to when no one here is doing it.  But we all know general consensus about GH so its going to be huge, not to mention full 7 days out for its first week. 

I had problems though putting the Wii version over the 360 version for first week but it's probably considering a lot of Wii gamers may not even have to buy any of the instruments unless they are wanting the whole band.  It's still questionable if people are going to buy GUITAR Hero for drums and mic.  But who knows.  Game will sell lots.

I put the Wii version over the 360 version for a couple reasons.

1. Much less competition. Rock Band 2, and the Rock Band series as a whole, is stealing a fair amount of hype from Guitar hero on the 360. The Wii is a different case. Rock Band sold well on the system, but nowhere near as well at Guitar hero III and certainly not as much as on the other consoles. Rock Band 2 for the Wii won't be coming out for a good while, and World Tour offers many of the same things.

2. The Wii is closing the gap for Guitar Hero, even when it comes to first week sales. Look at Guitar Hero: Aerosmith:

Wii: 155,902

360: 163,344

The Wii userbase has been widening the gap even more since then, and come holiday time the end of October, when it's coming out (very soon, I guess), the Wii will have a pretty large userbase advantage. The disparity may not be as large as I've suggested, but I feel confident in saying that the Wii version will sell more first week. Then again, a lot of my predictions just don't end up coming true.

3. World Tour has a lot of room to expand over the previous iteration. The 360 had a strong showing with Guitar Hero II, and likely reached its sales capacity (or close to it) for the series with III. The Wii started the series off with Guitar Hero III, and I seem a lot of room for growth amongst the userbase. Especially since it's growing faster as well.

Fair reasonings. Can't argue too much with that. Good to see another person on this forum that understands why things sales and relations to userbases haha.

Walmart had:

Band Bundle:
Wii - 4
PS2 - 0
360 - 4
PS3 - 2

Dual Guitar Bundle:
Wii - 12
PS2 - 10
360 - 10
PS3 - 8

Single Guitar Bundle:
Wii - 24
PS2 - 10
360 - 20
PS3 -14

Game Only:
Wii - 0
PS2 - 30
360 - 20
PS3 - 20

I have no idea why it was distributed like this but I got there about 2 hours early (first spot in line) and talking to the cashier in the electronics department for a bit I was able to get this info.

All of the Wii band bundles were gone with the 5th person in line and several folks behind them ended up settling on dual and single guitar bundles. Of the first 5 people in line, the one that wasn't getting a Wii band bundle got a 360 bundle.

Sounds like Activison is anticipating the Wii/360 sales. 3/4 of the SKU choices favored the Wii and to a lesser extent the 360. Looks like they're also anticipating a lot of PS2 owners to just buy the game, and are only interested in getting instruments out to the Wii crowd and not only the game.

lets not forget that last year the 360 already had a huge GH2 userbase, so alot of the sales were just the game without the guitar(a much cheaper option)... So this year its gonna be a close first week

The first evidence seems to support the 360/Wii versions selling better.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/guitar-hero-world-tour-launch-a-mixed-bag-says-analyst/?biz=1

UBS conducted checks with retailers like WalMart, Best Buy, GameStop and others across 20 states and found that the full bundle version of World Tour is "selling well despite relatively light allocations of the full-band kit." While the bundles for the Xbox 360 and Wii were "near sell-outs," the PS3 version was "more likely to be in stock," Schachter noted.

He continued, "Guitar Hero World Tour bundles were more likely to be available at Best Buy and WalMart across all platforms, while GameStop was offering full bundles only to those that had pre-ordered the title with game-only and guitar-only versions of the title available (and in stock) for walk-in customers. The next day or so will provide some insight into whether there was a higher level of pre-ordering customers that failed to pick up the game (this will be a key data point). Notably, Rock Band 2 bundles were consistently available for all platforms across each of the retailers that we checked."