lol maybe even 2 million. but I bet End of life sale for dragon quest 9 will be 15 million. I hope Dragon Quest 10 for Wii will sell 5 million first day!

I suggest you take a real hard look at the sales figures for Dragon Quest and RPGs in general. It'll help you not make stupid predictions like these.

Unlikely. The rumor mill is pointing to an unbelievable debut....With 2 days of sales, it may hit north of 3 million.

If that is the case, I don't see how it can sell to a lot more after the first 2 days - not without a major drop, at least.

I'm thinking:

3.2m first week (if numbers are true)
0.5-0.8m second week
0.2-0.3m third week
0.3m afterwards
=
4.2-4.6m lifetime.

No, all of Japan has it now. All 100 million people.

That's about 400k higher than the best opening week ever in Japan, correct (2.6 million FF VIII)? Has there been a game with a bigger opening?

anything over 2.6 million would break the record, but don't be so quick to call it a record until we get famitsu and media create in. DQ has better legs than final fantasy in general, but it is still front loaded. It is more casual than many RPGs, and in this case with the multi-player you may see even more legs than usual. I could see 5 or 6 million.

Well, it have real chances of another million in second week, so 4 million in first 2 weeks and take 1 year to make another million. And a realistic 1 million in west alone this game can do 6 million worldwide. Awesome for any game.

2nd week over 1 million is not gonna happen for DQIX.
The 2nd hand market is huge in Japan, and those numbers won't be tracked.

A lot of core gamers finished this game in 2 days, if they don't care about the side quests, they will dump the used copies to the market.
Releasing games on DS has no mechanism (e.g. DLC) to keep gamers holding this game a little bit longer.

Still, SE has done a great job shipping more than 3 million copies to stores for the launch day.

Well, maybe the collection factor may hold the used market for a while, no? Maybe Japanese players don't give importance to have a collection...

Isn't the second hand market illegal in Japan?

Or was that once upon a time?