New Year's week analysis:

1) ioi's original and revised Wii predictions are the same from here on in so I've combined them in the chart.

2) Very good predictions by ioi, very poor ones by ZorroX.

NOTE: "to 10M/5M thru Jan 31" indicates how far sales will be from the 10M/5M target if the prediction set is 100% correct from now on.

Predictions within 15%.

Predictions worse than 30%.

nice so ioi is winning. But ZorroX got it right for FF week! Though if he did, he should've done better than ioi the following 2 weeks which he didnt.

How long has the 5/10 mil contest got left to go? 5-6 weeks?

I think the Wii pretty much has it in the bag.

Longer than that.  Based on ioi's predictions, Wii should have 135.5k left to go at the end of the month.  He has the Wii declining throughout January ending at 35k for the final week.  If sales remain flat from then on and Wii settles at 35k per week, it would hit its goal in the week ending Feb 28.

EDIT: originally wrote that ioi had Wii ending January at 30k, but I was reading the PS3 column.

Things got a bit messy with both ioi and ZorroX revising their predictions at different points in time.  ioi posted his changes, but ZorroX only provided revisions to Noobie on request (never posted in the 10M/5M discussion) and sometime after ioi.  I'm a bit murky on the details.

But... I can provide a few numbers:

ZorroX's original predictions at the end of September had Wii at 9,648,362 for this week which is actually closer that ioi's revised prediction of 9,771,252 made on October 21.  The VGC cume for Wii is 9,674,461 so ZorroX's number is 26.1k under and ioi's number is 122.9k over.  ioi's original guess made on Sept 28 was 9,873,362 for this week which is 198.9k over.

ZorroX's original prediction for PS3 had it at 4,763,366 for this week.  ioi's revised PS3 prediction was 4,395,749 and his original was 4,423,366.  VGC's cume for PS3 this week is 4,579,587. So, ZorroX's prediction is 183.8k over while ioi's revised and original guesses are 183.8k and 156.2k under respectively.

LOOK AT THAT LAST SENTENCE!  ZorroX's original and ioi's revised PS3 cumes have the exact same error in opposite directions!!!!!!

Anyway, when you look at the cumulative result, ZorroX's original predictions are "winning" because his Wii total is almost dead on.  ioi's predictions have been very good for the last few weeks, but he underestimated the PS3 and overestimated the Wii throughout most of the contest so there is a pretty big cumulative error there: his Oct 21 numbers predicted that Wii would be leading by 375.5k by this point and perhaps it's worth noting that PS3 has already exceeded his predicted total through the end of January.

HOWEVER... ioi's PS3 cume is going to end up much better than ZorroX's.  That's because ZorroX's PS3 predictions post-FFXIII week are all CRAZZY!

Post New Year's Week Update from the 10M/5M thread:

 http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=87346&page=1

1) Media Create numbers are about 4k less than VGC for both consoles.

2) Sony announced this week that Gran Turismo 5 will not be released in March after all, which makes the PS3's chances of catching up seem quite bleak.

Time lead: Wii (1 week)

Post-New Year's week analysis:

1) Somewhat surprisingly, ZorroX's original Wii prediciton for this week was higher than ioi's predictions, giving him his first "green" prediction since FFXIII week (and compared to Media Create, he's almost dead on).  As usual, though, his PS3 prediction is crazzy!

NOTE: "to 10M/5M thru Jan 31" indicates how far sales will be from the 10M/5M target if the prediction set is 100% correct from now on.

Predictions within 15%.

Predictions worse than 30%.

Here's the latest update from the 10M/5M thread:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=87346&page=1

1) Last week's numbers were adjusted down for both consoles: Wii by about 8k and PS3 by about 3k.

Time lead: Wii (1 week)

How do you get to 1 week lead time? PS3 is far closer to Wii's number from 2 weeks ago (-5 million obviously) than last weeks number.

I use the week when the lead console passed the trailing console's current corresponding total. So for this week, it would be the answer to the question, "When did Wii pass 9,683,737?" which was last week. This was explained in the New Years update.

Next week the gap will be 2 weeks, though, and this should increase substatially as time passes because while 115k lead only represented 1 week of sales in December, as sales decline, that same lead might represent up to 5 weeks of sales.