Yes and the great thing about having two HD console is that you can recognise that the games from them have similar sales patterns so if the numbers are correct they should be fairly similar and guess what? They most certainly are!

Although with a very high total sales:First week sales ratio the addition of Wii Play would in fact lower the first week sales number needed for a Wii game to hit 1 million

Inclusions of Wii Play would lower the Wii numbers further and I thought fanboys would complain hence I omitted it

Edit: Yep exactly right Scottie

Nice work, that must of taken a while to do lol

56k/s internet + VGChartz = longer than you probably think :P

However, the good news is that the site has even more valuble sales information now and it really is a credit to the site because it would not have been possible without what VGC has on offer.

Good research. No surprises but nice to see it in black and white. Now, the interesting next step would be to repeat the exercise at a genre level - i.e what about shooter vs RGP, etc?

Do that and you'd have a nice profile of each consoles profile for 1M plus sellers by genre plus a good feel for what opening sales show a strong likelihood of 1M plus sales.

There is one major flaw with your final conclusion that I almost hate to point out. Without showing how many games opened with similar number and yet failed to make a million its not safe to say games opening to those numbers will make a million. Unfortunately the number needs a bit of additional work to make the last jump there.

 Edit: In principle I stand behind this statement. In actuality I am havign trouble findign even a couple games per system that would buck this trend definitively. Sometimes solid logic can lead you to somewhat misleading conclusions. I will continue to look around.

 As another though you might want to modify some of the 360 data as well. Lego Indiana Jones, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and one of the Viva Pinata games (likely the best selling one) were all bundled for a decent bit of time. On the flip side Halo 3 should also probably be tossed out for skewing the data way too far in the other direction. Similar problems arise for Motorstorm on the PS3, but I don't think the one game will skew it too much.

Having numbers that are similar means nothing since they both could be off or just one.  You talk about similar patterns but that doesn't hold true for every game.  If it did it would mean one console's games would always sell better than the other's and I can easily point out different games where that isn't the case.

I'll repeat what I've already said, we have no way of knowing if most of the numbers for non-charting games are accurate.

Maybe so however it's an average and there are always going to be outliers or times that the number needs a modifier of some sort.. An example is if you are looking at a sequel it is usually always more front loaded and if a sequel does the same or worse in the first week/month it can be almost instantly concluded that it will actually do worse overall than the last game in the series. I'm not trying to give all the answers as nobody can 100% mathematically predict the sales of a game but we can see a few things very clearly from the results.. The major one being the difference in sales patterns in Wii and HD consoles. That was the key argument I was trying to support/disprove and I think, to me, it supports the argument that calling Wii games a flop after only a week of sales is ridiculous.. These numbers point to that being the case.

For me to go through every game that launched with similar numbers but failed to make a million would be a MASSIVE task and so my numbers will stand as they are. 

fantastic research

really shows what a beast PS3 really is in selling software....

Also shows People MUST WAIT before deciding the fate of wii games