PS3 Slim actually selling

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, and I don't agree with Lazy. This is a short-term boost because of the lowered price. It won't last and Sony won't get anywhere near Nintendo or Microsoft in the US or Japan. The gap is far too huge and the system has no major upcoming exclusives to help sell it.

Guess again. I guess you also haven't heard of Heavy Rain? Sony's slowly mounting an offensive with several key titles to pigeon-hole a place in 2nd and compete with 360 directly.

As for Blu-Ray, lots of people are still on normal, SD televisions. Demand isn't THAT huge. So no, the PS3 price drop has helped, but it won't come anywhere near catching up in the US or Europe, no way.

You're not doing your homework, demand for HD gaming is so-so but the demand for HD movie players is doing quite well. As of right now most people in the US who own a TV own an HDTV and plan on getting a bluray player "when the price drops". Right now, people are watching standard DVD's on HDTVs but the demand for HD programing and pay-per-view movies in HD is causing cable and satellite companies to devote more and more bandwidth to the data. The next 4 years is going to be a huge turn around. It doesn't mean HD gaming numbers will go up, but it wont hurt them either.

The PSP has been extremely successful hardware sales-wise, actually. It's probably the best selling second place videogame system ever.

You have to be kidding me. It hasn't even produced half the number of DS sales and every gaming store and pawn shop in the world has stacks of used PSP's for sale. It doesn't have a single piece of software on any top list anywhere unless you want to count the "3 million shipped" of Monster Hunter; even God of War on PSP flubbed. You can say the PSP has 50+ million sales but you realize that's people who bought one as an alternative to an ipod (movies, music, web browsing) and promptly regretted their purchase. It's basically what the Wii is going through, except with a handful of better games and the strength of its buzz among casuals and retro gamers.

Game sales have always lagged behind hardware, but hardware sales at least have been much better than I expected when it first came out, really. The PSP Go is completely stupid though, way too expensive for no significant added features and no disc drive. Evidently they aren't dropping the normal system though, so there likely will still be disc releases... and not everything's going to be available on digital download, I'm sure. So what's the point, exactly, aside from getting Sony some absurd profit margin?

Digital Distro is where everyone is going, I give it 10 years to fully infect and MS's planned handheld will use it exclusively and have no physical media drive for video games (but it will have SD and USB so go figure). Sony's going to be attempting the medialess ideal with a few key releases either this year or next. All the shit really hit the fan when a small company figured out to take high res textures and HD sets and shrink them down to tiny, easily distributed and highly compressed files. They're working on Wiiware stuff right now and promise 'unparalleled visuals for a wiiware game'. But the basics are: God of War was going to be a digital only game but Sony feared it wouldn't grab attention that way. Since it didn't grab attention anyway, they're pushing the distro.

If I can find the particular article it mentioned the idea of half and half, you buy a disk or card that contains hardwired game data and then download the appropriate content while it pulls what it needs from the physical counterpart. This comes off the heels of many companies being afraid to attempt digital distro, so you have to buy "half" the game at the store.