The third-party situation is a messy one. It's not exactly well-known, but Nintendo's dominance on the Wii is pretty much mirror-image of their dominance on the NES. Few third parties did well on the NES, and even fewer came anywhere near the levels of Nintendo's sales numbers; the closest was the original Dragon Quest, which came in at 3.87 million units, far far shy of the top-selling Nintendo-made games for the era. Only 22 of 64 million sellers on NES were non-Nintendo (34.375%), and they made up 34.65 million of 219.6 million sales amongst those 64 titles (a mere 15.779%).

That's actually very normal for a disruptive Blue Ocean product. Until developers really "get" what it takes to be successful on a platform (and it's usually only newcomers that "get" it completely), you don't see a lot of great success from third-party contributors. By the next generation, however, the developers who are going to stick around will have gotten the hang of appealing to the values inherent in the Wii. Which will be largely moot if the next generation comes too soon, since Nintendo is just going to shake things up again.

It most likely will.

@Sky Render, so your saying it will outsell the PS2 unless someone releases a console that effectively stops the Wii before it has a chance of making it to that many sales?

So shortened up "most likely".

Heh, that's a fair approximation. There's a lot of factors to consider once same-value competition does emerge too, such as Nintendo's level and type of response to it. The only scenarios where the Wii won't surpass the PS2 are the ones where same-value competition comes out very soon and Nintendo takes almost no actions to keep the Wii afloat against said competition. Given that Nintendo's E3 2008 showing was a preemptive counterattack to a threat that never surfaced from Microsoft, I think it's safe to say that the latter part of that requirement isn't going to happen. They're just too heavily on their guard to be taken down that easily.

Wow, that a lot of words for: "yes"

I agree with Soriku. If sales don't suddenly drop overnight then the Wii is definitely on track to outselling PS2. I also agree with Leo-j that the Wii will not deserve it.

Onyx - Why don't you think the PS2 deserved it? I can't think of a better library of games. What, in your opinion, deserves that spot?

I like to be precise. A good analyst must always explain their reasoning and clarify what they mean to avoid miscommunication. It also helps to cite your sources, which I didn't do this time, unfortunately. Still, I'm sure you can guess where I got my numbers from (hint: you're already at the site they're from if you're reading this).

Instead of finding this particularly interesting from an analytical point of view, I fin myself more excited by the prospect of whatever experience could be that profoundly different.

Mmmm.

Most likely it will, even if for bare 10 millions or the like. Something like 150m Wii vs 140m PS2.

fixed :9