Lifetime or first week? As a lifetime number that's a very low bar which it will easily cross imo.
Apologies, what I meant when I made my original post was "bottom", not "ceiling". Basically, what I intended to say is that, right now, the game should have no problems selling at minimum 500,000 copies. I think it's still too soon to have a clearer idea on the ceiling, we'll see in the next few months. I'll have to edit my post though XD
Isnt this the general way of estimating sales? Sampling and extrapolating? I figure surveying digital buy percentage is as good a method as surveying in store purchases fron retailers.
This is what hiska-kun reported a few years ago, soon after Famitsu started releasing digital numbers monthly.
The Famitsu digital sales are estimates based on surveys, and reseaches. The magazine says they use a website to do it, the poll is about 10.000 people for each system. They extrapolate and calculated the rest.
The champion is certainly big enough, but I have doubts about how representative it is: at least with Nintendo titles, we have several examples of games being underestimated, as well as Zelda: Botw being actually overestimated for its first few months, which might indicate that the core audience is over-represented, lowering the champion's reliability.