Rubbish, you speak as if every europe/other gamer owns a PS3.

Somewhere around 2.5 million without bundling and then about 4-5 with it. Basically what everybody else has more or less said.

I've heard countless times how we europeans love racing games but apparently that doesn't extend to Forza.

No, not every one. A large and significant group however does and they care about games like GT. The PS3 momentum now and the soon to follow Wii momentum due to a price cut will overshadow any game on 360 or pc. Sad but true for the good old pc.

Beautiful multiplat games like Need for speed shift recently being released aren't helping either. Let's not forget about Dirt 2 either, great game btw.

Just throwing in some perspective.

I personally don't have a very good idea what I'd predict first week for Forza 3 (perhaps 600k?) but thinking about other releases helped me find my ceiling and floor figures.

"A large and significant group" - I could say exactly the same about 360.

People that own a 360 are not suddenly going to stop buying games because PS3 and Wii sales rise .. there is still a 12 million userbase you're totally forgetting.

I understand, COD4 has a very strange sales life pattern though.

I'm with you on that one, I'm just going by what the last one did and raising the bar a bit, could be totally off. I don't think it's an easy game to predict for.

yeah the PS3 price-cut took the world by storm. But help me put right here: How does a lower PS3 hardware price hurt Xbox360 software sales?

Forza 2 sold 350k first week. I can't see Forza 3 sales decline. There were like 10 million Xbox360s sold back in 2007 and there will be 33 million Xbox360s sold when Forza releases.

And according to VGC there are  85k pre-orders in the US already and this number grows by 11k every week. So when this game releases, there will be at least 160k pre-orders in US alone.

The only reason for Forza 3 having a "bad" first week might be that the data will just cover 1 day of sales in Others.

Money can only be spend once, ofcourse higher PS3 and Wii sales will affect the 360. Let's say there are 10 people planning to get forza with an 360 who recently also got a PS3 due to the pricecut. It's fair to say they are more inclined to look at what their new purchase has to offer and are very likely to get some games that are exclusive to the PS3 and they had missed before. I assume 7 of those people are now unlikely to get the game they would have gotten before since the budget is gone.

Due to piracy being pretty large in Europe I also think the 12 million userbase should be taken with a very very large grain of salt.

@starcraft ur kidding on the 400k WW prediction?

i predict a 700k to 800k 1st week and lifetime of near abouts 4.5million. im taking instal base into consideration

i wouldnt separate bundled and unbundled, its not fair. if a popular retail game is bundled the sales should still count, ie demand for a console was such that more copies are published to get into gamers hands.