Honestly I think Sega is sadly mistaken and majorly over confident. While I have no doubt that Sonic & Mario At the Olympics will be a successful hit 4-million copies sold is totally unreasonable. Lets take a second to look at exactly what market bases Sonic and Mario have.

Now before I give sales stats for games (Not VGC sales info) I will give my reasoning for not giving sales info of mainstream Mario and Sonic titles. Mainstream Mario games like Sunshine have supposedly sold around 5-million copies and Sonic Adventure 2 which sold a little over a million copies. But Sonic And Mario at the Olympics is not going to sell as well as the mainstream titles. It is a spin-off and much like other mini-game spin-offsit will only appeal to a small minority of the mainstream market.

 So just how large is the established user base that would likely be buying this game. I have decided to use Sonic and Mari's respective Party titles to give us some insight into just how big this market potential could be. MarioParty7 (1.86 million) and  Sonic Shuffle (Under a mill). So the established user base at best for a spin-off mixing both franchises is about 2-million strong. Far from the 4-million predicted.

 Now as I'm sure others will argue that the Wii is gathering a much larger audience then GameCube had. Thats true but the new casual gamers likely to purchase S&M:ATO won't make up another 2-million. Since this is a year sports title (Olympics 2008) I doubt it will have longevity after 2008.

 So what is my predicition. I predict that Sonic and Mario at the olympics will push about 2-3 million units over its lifespan. To think that it will be a rival to Mario:Galax/Halo3/SmashBros or any other big hit this fall would be fairly arrogent. Sorry Sega but I think you slipped up this time!

First of all I agree 4-million is out of their league as far as I can see.

But I will say your estimation for the user base is off.   Mario Party 7 while full of minigames presumably like M&S at the Olympics, is not the only userbase interested in the mario franchise or its spinoffs, its just the only ones who purchased that particular spinoff.

I actually don't think there is a good way to gauge the market for this sort of product but if I were going to try anyways I would start with the full Mario + Sonic base, account for overlap and whittle it down from there.  How you would go about accounting for overlap is a tricky proposition of course, but hey we agree this game isn't going to sell 4 million so why bother messing with it?

There is a thread about it, look here:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=7318&start=0#end

Its got Mario and Miyamoto is connected it will sale millions, its the perfect thing to hit hard nintendos casuals. Just think, mommy is buying her kid a wii this holiday and she looks at the games. Olympics is the safe bet for over protective soccer mon.

We don't need *another* thread about Mario & Sonic sales. I'm closing this one.

(I thought this was going to be a general thread about Sega, not a thread about Mario&Sonic...).