Kurosaki Ichigo said:
Could be 99.9% sell-through but what I mean is that its still miles ahead in shipment vs the other pokemon titles. Nintendo, this time, did take it into account and put possibly the biggest first shipment ever (more so considering FF8 2,5m was 4 day, possibly having a 2nd shipment in the weekend), a shipment that should have been more than enough to meet demand...except demand exploded as much as supply. It's probably coming short but given the shipment and restocking, this time Nintendo did took some serious anti-undershipping measures, we were expecting a 20-25% lesser shipment than what turned out to be sold.
We have to look at the overall situations in the proper context. Just looking at pure numbers doesn't paint the entire picture (though I'm not saying you're wrong or anything).
I'm confident Pokemon Diamond/Pearl could have opened somewhere around 2 million as well, but it came out during the season when Nintendo couldn't keep the DS hardware in stock and several million selling games were released in Japan (NSMB, FFIII, Pokemon, and the games after these plus the evergreens like MKDS, BT1/2, ACWW). The DS had exploded in the West around the same time, compounding Nintendo's plastic/cartridge problems. Pokemon D/P weren't the only games slammed with supply constraints back then.
Pokemon B/W virtually has this season all to itself. No other upcoming DS game aside from Ni no Kuni will even remotely require a huge initial shipment. So, Nintendo was in a good position to make sure they could meet the bar set for the pre-orders and then exceed it by some. The fact Nintendo went through all the pre-orders and all the walk-ins and still sold out in many locations speaks a lot. Amazon JP is currently sold out and restocks by the 24th (could be sooner).
So, I would still label BW as undershipped, but Nintendo was as prepared for the initial wave as any company could reasonably be. I wasn't a big proponent of using the past Pokemon numbers to determine where BW would stand because the pre-order numbers and the changing sales climate made past comparisons practically irrelevant. It's even possible BW will have relatively short, HGSS-style legs rather than a protracted sales life as the market shifts into 3DS. Who knows!