In a statement issued today, Virgin Megastores has predicted that Gizmondo will be the fifth most popular games console purchase this Christmas.
Using complex mathematical witchcraft the retail chain concludes that the top five consoles will be Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, Game Boy Micro and Gizmondo.
Such an estimate seems drastically out of touch, given that nearly 50,000 PS2s were sold last week - with the console recently reaching 100 million sales worldwide - and Gizmondo appears to have been anything but a commercial success.
A representative for Virgin stressed that the figures had spoken, and that numbers for sales projections, current stock held and total units sold were fed into the calculations that produced the forecast.
Anyone suggesting that this must mean Virgin is sitting on warehouses full of unwanted Gizmondo machines should be treated as being 'mostly cynical'.