Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has already had a busy week. So far he’s predicted that Project Natal will run $50 for Xbox 360 users and that it will sell 10 million units in about a year, which he thinks will be five times as many units as Sony’s Arc will sell.

“I think that the Sony motion controller will have some problems gaining traction, since it is not an ‘in the box’ solution,” he told PS3 Center. “That will probably limit adoption to 1 or 2 million at the outset.” He thinks the extra sales of Natal will help it gain a third-party advantage over the Arc.

The real shocker for me is that $50 price tag for Natal. For a company that charges more than a benjy for a low capacity hard drive, $50 for the latest gaming technology seems crazy. Of course, that’s exactly what Nintendo did with the Wii and I think we all know how that turned out.

Alongside the release of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 there’s a war of numbers breaking out. Analysts are trying to be the first to pin down a sales estimate, a number that has so far varied by several million units. At first it was Ben Schachter claiming 7 million for day one. Michael Pachter thinks Ben’s crazy, and estimates just 4 million copies for the first day. I’m inclined to trust Pachter, since even he puts things over the top at times.

Whatever the real number, it has a lot of zeroes, and that’s got to make Activision pretty happy. Most analysts still think the 12 million unit estimate for the quarter through December is conservative. That puts total sales by year end somewhere around $700 million, which is just obscene. By comparison, Halo 3 just made it through 8 million units in its first 3 months. As a throwback, Joystiq also mentioned that Street Fighter II, which literally everyone I knew owned, sold 6.3 million units total worldwide.

Hopefully the end of the quarter will bring some hard and fast numbers for us. Until then, go throw some knives at some people. It’s insanely fun.