VGC has 130k for this game which has to be wrong since the NPD data for the first 2 months is 130k alone. The NPD data seems to imply the stock is overvalued though, unless people are seeing something I am not. I don't see the momentum to get beyond 400k copies.
With almost two weeks in the January NPD giving it 81k of sales only, it would be a miracle if it reaches 250k in the US. Niche "hardcore" titles are very front-loaded and I wouldn't be surprised if the sales drop off tremendously on the February NPD, 40-50k perhaps?
I'm guessing 400k LTD for this title: 200k in the US, 150k in PAL, and 50k in Japan.
In Week 5 2008 of the UK charts, AW:DS dropped out completely from the individual formats list and dropped 2 slots to number 13 in the DS List.
It seems like it's not doing well in UK, the biggest market in EU. Historically, AW games do not do well in Japan. It needs tremendous numbers in the US to reach the 660k we're predicting for the lifetime sales of the game right now.
Actually, it's sort of strange how this franchise collapsed in Japan. It was historically quite decent. The first installment that did poorly was Game Boy Wars III, which was released in the dying days of the Game Boy Color (after the GBA was already released)... and since then there's just been no Japanese interest.
Fire Emblem stills does quite well in Japan, so it's not even like you can say "the Japanese don't like turn-based strategy"... and for the same reason, the difficulty can't be to blame. The whole AW series has good production values.
It's probably for the best that Nintendo started releasing everything stateside, because I don't think that the Wars franchise would have been able to sustain itself if it wasn't for the 50%+ of sales it now gets from the US.
Thanks guys for eating my profits with your analysis, I guess I rode the exuberance of this stock too long and got greedy :) I have to agree because of lack of interest in Japan and Europe, Advance wars is a niche title.
Perhaps the new look will endear more adult Japanese gamers....here's to hoping! Maybe it doesn't do well because its not Super Robot War...
The Japan numbers are Famitsu. Because there is no official Famitsu repository that provides LTDs, you are forced to use a third party site. I personally use Japan GameCharts, which sources its data originally from Famitsu.com and Game-Data no Heya. It is considered reliable. If you wanted to see week-by-week data, you could see it here (an excellent source, run by JoshuaJSlone. It shows that we only have data for the first two weeks of sales, and after that in off-chart sales there was enough to get an end-of-the-year update.
GBA data is harder to come by. Japan GameCharts (by choice) only lists games that have broken 200k, which neither of the AW installments for GBA did. It should be noted that AW is so unpopular in Japan that the two GBA installments were actually released in a double pack in 2004. I only have access to the Famitsu top 100 for 2004 (located here), which goes down to 130,000 sales and Advance Wars did not make it. If you have access to the Famitsu top 500, those normally go down to ~10,000 sales and it's virtually certain you'd be able to get a reliable number from there.
NPD figures cannot by site rules or NPD rules posted here. I understand that me saying "I've got the numbers, they're not hot, but I can't post them" isn't exactly re-assuring so I invite you to ignore my section on US sales. Unfortunately, the issues with NPD numbers make this sort of thing tricky.
In terms of online connections, my data comes from here. Every week on NeoGAF Bo130 posts all the Nintendo WFC data in a thread. You can view his methodology there, and rest assured his information is true.
While I would agree with some of your analysis (I'll break it down more when I get time), could you provide links to where you got your data, as I have a hard time trusting a post that asserts certain trends in sales or talks about sales figures but contains no links to sources where that data came from.
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VGC has 130k for this game which has to be wrong since the NPD data for the first 2 months is 130k alone. The NPD data seems to imply the stock is overvalued though, unless people are seeing something I am not. I don't see the momentum to get beyond 400k copies.