Yet again, the wonderful backspace deleted everything I had up till my comments on Skate.

A few notes:

#1 The Orange Box does exceptionally well for it's first week. Despite launching only 3 weeks after Halo 3, it's sales are rather good for a game that is although exceptional, has recieved very little hype from magazines. Yet again, the 90%+ effect strikes again, propelling a well-reviewed game to a 200k starting week. I'd expect a big-ger drop next week (55%+) following by a strong Christmas following.

#2. Halo suffers a pretty big drop, atleast to me. However, with 3.5m US/Can sold on 7.5m machines, that's pretty good. Not everyone wants Halo 3, and it's going to take more and more X360 hardware to be sold for it to keep moving the units it is. However, with Christmas looming, and November Rush starting in just 3 weeks, we should see constant 150k+ weekly sales.

#3, #4 & #6. Sports games do "meh" numbers. All in the 30-40k range. Color me unimpressed, but that's probably because I dislike most sports games. Fifa has a decent debut, despite it being a soccer game. With the strong sales of Fifa in PAL territories, FIFA 08 has a chance of hitting 1m worldwide before it dies. The basketball games do good, but not solid, as they have horrid drops.

#5. Skate - probably the most impressive hold of the week. Despite a 74k opening week (which was bad, real bad), it's already reached a 3x multiplier. With nonexistant drops (dropped about 10k since week 2). Skate has the outside shot of doing gangbusters during Nov-Dec, and hitting some ungodly numbers. 500k shouldn't be taken as rule - that's the lowest it should do. Nevertheless, Skate could hit 1m before it dies.

#7. Madden has another decent-sized drop. Still doing 30k+ so far into the F-ball season is good. Expect increasing numbers for Christmas. Should still hit 2m by Christmas. For comparison: Madden 07 sold 20k the same week, and was still below 1m (930k). Madden 07 sold another 700k after that day.

#8. Probably the most dissapointing game for me on the list. PGR4 has a sizable drop of 60%+. I have great hope it'll have good legs ala Forza. PGR3 died real quick, but managed to stay a long time in that wonderful #100-#200 area for months so...Could turn out good with a strong Christmas.

#9. Oblivion continues to be a beast. Kind of strange that Oblivion is now outpreforming itself vs. the same time last year.

#10. Sega Rally bombs. Much lower than Dirt for a debut, but Christmas could help sales.

#11. Gears of War has another small drop, continuing it's spectacular run. It's still *averaging* a 15-20% attach ratio with X360 sales. This has been in virtual lock-step since May, and will probably continue that way for awhile. The big question is: will it do this when the X360 sells 1.2-1.5m units during December?

#12. Guitar Hero 2, like Gears, keeps it's suprisingly-strong run going strong. Although it's been out of the top-10 for awhile, it's still a great game to track like GOW and RSV, since their sales depend on X360s selling, not market conditions. Yes, 1.5m expected LTD is low, but that's the minimum it'll sell, not the max.

#13. Bioshock keeps dropping. With Orange Box debuting at #3 for the year for FPS games (behind H3 and Bioshock), it's no suprise that Bioshock drops due to the increased competition in the genre. However, it's still holding well considering it's debut, and will cruise past 1m soon, and should hit my projected 1.5m before it stops charting.

#14. Rainbow Six Vegas continues to get close to the 1.3m mark. Such an ungodly beast. Who woulda thought a game that barely scrapped 130k vs. Gears would still be selling 15k+ per week nearly a year later?

#15. Spiderman Friend or Foe cuts its position in half. Expect a short stay in the top 400 charts....But should sell well during Christmas - enough to get it to my projections.

RPG Watch:

Eternal Sonata and Two Worlds sell 11k copies each this week, which is fairly decent. Two Worlds is tracking about 50% week-over-week currently, versus Oblivion's similar week standings. ES is tracking similar to Blue Dragon at the same point, but is having bad drops like Blue Dragon is. Holidays should treat the RPGs well, as they all should do well during Christmas.

Japanese charts:

The few scant notes on Japan:

Overall, hardware sold very well, but like when the Elite launched in PAL and US territories, software did not. Although a few games (2) got great jumps, it wasn't in step with what Trusty Bell sold for software.

#1. Project Gotham 4 has a mediocre debut. Roughly 65% of PGR3, it's not a great start. However, with Christmas, and console-moving games coming, it should have good legs. Also, the budget-price version of PGR3 almost outsold the normal PGR3 version.

#2. Halo has a typical drop for a Western game, despite the fact it's already sold ~65k. Expect it to plodder along for the rest of the year in typical X360 lagging fasion: in the 50-200 area(s).

#3. Project Darkness does very bad numbers according to Y-Koron. Real, real bad. Hopefully with other games coming out, it can piggyback onto other games. However, don't fret - the US release should do well, and boost sales of the game rather well (I'd expect no less than 100k for the US debut).

#4. Oblivion has another standard drop. It's mimicing the US sales of Bioshock in a way: suprisingly high, but typical high-10% drops. Could get a second life when AC6 debuts, and it gets a best price (which isn't on the docket yet).

#5-6. Viva Pinata and Blue Dragon are the only 2 games to really get a good boost on sales. Although elites probably, for a majority, didn't sell to new owners. Some (I'd say 20%) did. 50% boosts for both games are good, but expect semi-large (30%) drops for both games next week. However, platinum edition(s) are coming out on 11/1 for AC6. Expect huge boosts then.

#7-8. Eternal Sonata goes unchanged. Ironically, the US counterpart has already outsold this one, whilst the same cannot be said for Blue Dragon, yet. RSV gets a small boost.

Good analysis, but mrstickball you forgot Gears of War. It just hit 3 million and thats a good and excellent accomplishment. Not one time since its reason has Gears of War left the top 50 spot. Good for Gears of War. And Halo 3 is closing in on Pokemon and is about to surpass it pretty soon, give it a couple of more weeks.

Im impressed by the Orange box, but those JRPG's need to see a great christmas so that microsoft can go to the Japanese and say "its worth doing ports"

I think Halo 3 expectations are way too high... The game sold phenomenally well... roughly a 50% install base which is really quite phenomenal. The sales of the game, relative to the hardware are most impressive. If the same 50% attach rate was applied to an install base in the U.S. of twice the size, the numbers would truly be astounding... Short of more hardware sold, like you said, Halo 3 HAS to drop off as not every single person is a Halo 3 fan... I suspect Halo 3 will have Gears of War type legs and continue to sell well.

If the 360 has the kind of hardware sales this holiday that it had last Christmas (and I don't see any reason why it can't given it had to compete with two launches from other consoles), Halo 3 could possibly push another couple of million copies out by year end without much trouble....

Poor 360.

The FPS/Sports stigma is getting harder and harder to shake off.

@Words of Wisdom
Reminds me of the Wii and its party/casual games.

Oblivion is doing well now because of the GOTY edition with Knights of the Nine and shivering isles expansion packs now included.

Just because those games are selling better.......Means that there just happens to be more of those games actually published on the X360.

Go look at PS2 charts - what's #1 right now? Sports games. It's that time of season in the US. Look at PAL charts. Fifa is #1 on most every platform, followed by NHL. Thats why the Wii is sucking lately in the US and PAL in terms of chartage - the Wii isn't preforming well for sports games, which sell really, really well.

Poor 360?

Yeah, could things have gone any worse for the 360 over the last two months? 

FPS games like BioShock, Halo 3 and Orange Box.  Sports games like Madden and skate...  This is a total disaster!