You do realize that the Wii is supply constrained, and that we're trying to figure out how much the Wii will sell in Q1 09, right? It isn't "will Wii sell 13M in January?" (Q4 sales = ~ 13M)

We do of course realize that things don't sell as much as when in christmas, any idiot can figure that out.  Saying "it will ship more than Sony or Microsoft" is also completely meaningless. That tells us what? As MS ships a lot before christmas, and little in Q1 (dunno why, but they tend to with most their products), meaning MS will ship ~ as much as Sony, which will ship like 2M for the quarter.

So your conclusion is: Wii shipments will > 2

(Sorry for sounding so harsh, but I felt you sounded really arrogant in your post, when you really had no content yourself).

if you look at the numbers there have been 8 million units sold in Nov & Dec combined so far. i wonder how many units will sell in the last two weeks.

now considering that production is 2.4 million per month, it's not hard to assume that Nintendo had to either use January stock or hold back stock in previous months. that is unless there were 3.2 million unsold units at the start of November.

January stock gets cannibalized by December of course. They're going to sell 3 million in the US in December alone. 

Of course they're not going to have a huge stock for January. Even if they did, they'd be stupid to ship a ton of units to retailers in January, they'd just clog retail channels, especailly with the US economy in the crapper. 

That's not creating "artificial shortages", that's just proper inventory management. 

You simply don't ship a lot of product in January, it's not done. Even the PSOne/PS2 atback in the day would not have a ton of inventory in January. 

Did you just make the exact same post (differently frased) twice?

There will probably be a slight drop.

well they are underperforming in japan but everybody is.

Doesn't make it any less true.

They're going to ship probably in the range of 3 million in December. 

Obviously January is going to be sub 1 million, probably 500k tops. Of course there's going to be a huge drop off. 

Anyone who's followed game sales for any reasonable period of time knows there's always a huge drop off from December to January for virtually every game machine, not sure why you guys expect Nintendo to be different. 

 500K tops, for a month, for the Wii? And you've followed game sales for a reasonable perioud of time?

Wii sold ~ 1250K in 4 weeks January last year.

500K is laughable. Nothing else.

And also, we don't expect anything else. Have you read the replies? We're wondering how low they will be. Saying "they will be low" doesn't answer the question.

Swoosh2000, if you think that anyone in this thread has said, or implied, or thought for one instant that sales would not drop from December to January, let me correct that now:

YOU ARE WRONG.

Last year, it's believed that there was an unusually steep drop in sales. The question of this thread is whether that will happen again this year: an unusually steep drop. Not a drop, which everyone agrees on.