Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Even as holiday seasons go, the previous two were pretty damn horrible if you were a parent trying to find a Wii for your offspring. You could spot a harried, stressed parent almost everywhere you turned on the high street, their wide, panicked eyes and expressions of fear and uncertainty giving them away in game emporiums up and down the land.

But it doesn't have to be the same this year! This year, lil' Timmy will be opening a fresh new Wii come Christmas Day -- as long as you buy early enough. And if not, at least now we have somebody to blame: EEDAR's director of analytical services Jesse Divnich. Writing on Gamasutra, Divnich suggests that falling prices on the Wii's gray market mean that supply and demand are now close to being equal. "Given the trend," reasons the analyst, "it is likely that supply will finally outpace demand before the holiday season."

Don't just rest on your laurels, however, for Divnich thinks that demand may outpace supply again during November and December. The best solution? Buy one now and hide it until the time for gift-giving has arrived.

Hide it well, though -- or at least, hide it better than this blogger's parents hid Virtua Racing during the Christmas 1994 season. I must have had a solid four weeks with that game before I was required to act surprised on Christmas Day morning.

In the most recent simExchange report, analyst Jesse Divnich had some interesting predictions about Wii software sales. According to Divinich, the top selling games will be as follows (including estimated worldwide sales for the software during the Wii's lifetime):

• Wii Play – 20 million
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl – 13.95 million
• Mario Kart – 13.16 million
• Super Mario Galaxy – 12.61 million
• Wii Fit – 8.73 million

We're not surprised that Divinich would predict Wii Play to be the top selling piece of Wii software, since the game is constantly popping up in the top of the NPD and Japanese charts. Since two of the five predicted games aren't even out yet, and one of them is only out in Japan, it's hard to tell by trends if the rest are good choices. Still, taking our best "we're not paid analysts" guesses, we'd say that Wii Fit will have much higher sales than Divinich predicted. The game already sold one million copies in Japan, and it's only been out for a month. We do think that those are a solid top five, though, even if we don't agree on the order and total sales for all games.

How about you? What are your best guesses for the Wii's top five?

[Via Joystiq]