From VG247.

only 16 million? Does not compute.

Those numbers are huge... even for the Wii.

Wait... America AND Europe.

In which case... the Wii figure is really low, the PS3 looks not bad, perhaps a tad high unless thete is a big strategic price cut.... the X360 figure is quite low too.

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The Wii will easily manage 20 million for America and Europe this year... perhaps 25 million. The X360 could do 11-12 million.... the PS3 without a price cut should do around 8 million, but with one it would bring the X360 down to 10-11 million, and itself up to about 10 million.

Then Japan, (not part of Actibliz numbers) which might see 2 million Wii (2/3rds of 2008) unless it picks up.
The PS3 maybe 1 million again (though before FF release it will be tracking below 2008 too)
The X360 should see a boost to maybe 400k.... but it depends on the games, it could fall to 300k.

I suppose they could be viewing a different size of "Europe"

But for 2008 the Wii managed over 20 million in America and Europe according to VGC.... it isn't going to drop by 4 million.

The PS3 managed about 8.5 million in 2008.... so 8 million is plausable IF there is not cut.

The X360 managed about 9.5-10 million in 2008, but it has had the momentum into the new year, so it should beat that by 1-2 million even if it slows down later in the year,... and easily beating million.

Maybe they count only EU ?

Or maybe they predict big crissis drops in sales ?

With the current economic conditions, I just assume they are being cautious with their predictions. The numbers might be a little low, but the ratios are about what you would expect. PS3=360. PS3 + 360 = Wii

I expect that under more normal economic climates they probably would have phrased their predictions as:

Wii: 20 Million +/- 4 Million
PS3: 10 Million +/- 2 Million
XBox 360: 10 Million +/- 2 Million

If they had done this no one would have cared because they would (essentially) be saying that they expected sales to (basically) continue as they have been ...

In the current economic climate they will base all of their sales off of the bottom of their prediction scale and (throughout the year) as sales out-perform their expectations they can always make an correction to their financials.

Well Nintendo had announced earlier that is sold 10.2m Wiis in the USA and 8m Wiis in the EU (by NPD and GFK) in 2008. Japan, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Australia etc pushed it up by at least another 5m.

I do think its a bit low, I would have gone 13m USA and maybe 10m Europe plus Japan and the rest of the world.

“We expect handhelds will grow in excess of 21 million units.”

I would be interested to see how this would this split amoung DS and PSP? 14m:7m? 20m:1m??

IF DS has another record year than DS2 will be less likely to show up anytime soon, and if PSP shows stagnation then we may see a PSP2 soon.... if sony is spending money they dont have to develop it.

However, the Wii numbers seem small. 16m would mean virtually no increase in sales over the previous 2 years.

--double post --