Man, was I the only one to immediately think a good name would have been "Karmagascar"?
And you could be this awesome guy called Max Damage driving a huge red car, running runs over old ladies and cows, racking up points and... no?
Maybe it was just me then... :|

And this is why I lurk joystiq.
You guys are better than a soap opera.
The drama, the romance, this has it all.

@Case:
For what it's worth, I own an original xbox but no ps2 and like I said above, PS3 ftw. :p

I'm European and for a long time I considered buying an xbox and I'm generally a Microsoft fanboy. (come on zune HD, come over to Europe).
But recently I went ahead and bought a PS3 over an Xbox.

It offers more value for the same money hardware-wise, has better exclusives in the pipeline, GoW3, Heavy Rain, The Last Guardian, Uncharted 2 from the top of my head.

The fact that the Xbox is so american centered does irk me a bit.
"We don't have blu-ray, but we have streaming HD from netflix which is even better." Some good that'll do me if Netflix isn't available here.

Anyway, go go PS3. (And to think that at one point I was just hoping it would fail horribly.)

I don't give a rats ass about the reason.
Only thing I care is that they want me to give them 99(ninety nine) cents for 1 second of sound.

Imagine iTunes minimum price was 10 dollars and individual tracks costed that much.
People would go:
A) "Oh, those songs aren't stupidily overpriced, it's just how iTunes charges things."
B) "WTF?! 10 dollars for one song????"

\m/

By that line of reasoning, "Women no have boobs! American government say so!"
Take The Witcher for example, an european RPG.
In the original version there are naked women in the game.
The American version had them censored because it clashes with the morals the powers that be would like all americans to have.

Does that make the American government evil for applying censorship to a bunch of boobies? No really, no, it's just a different mentality.
Accept that different cultures think differently.

Like sam said, one financial report does not a trend make.

I'll bite, I guess...

So, you're comparing monetary ultra-inflation to the fact that so many games are being created that they end up devaluing as a whole.

Money is a representation of wealth. If there is X money that represents Y wealth, if you print double that ammount of money with no increase of wealth (like what happened in those examples you mention) each unit of money is now worth half the wealth it represented before. Do this a bunch of times and money now is worth a fraction of what it once did. So, there is a fixed pool of wealth and each bill represents a fraction of that wealth, the more bills, the smaller the fractions. Fairly simple.

Now you're telling me the same thing works for games? If I create a new game, every previous game is now worth a bit less?
You can argue that the money people are willing to spend on games is a fixed ammount and if there are more games people will still buy the same ammount of games and as such will end up buying a smaller percentage of the available titles. The public ends up dispersed over a larger number of games.
Don't know if this was what you were going for, but it's the way I see your argument making a slight bit of sense.
That argument still does nothing to explain how the game market decreased as a whole. And it also has little to do with that inflation examples you mentioned.

Occam's Razor, probably the market is down because there have been less blockbusters this year.

Cyanea, I completely understand what you are saying, that is my point exactly.
As soon as there is a tool to make things more certain, you're gimping yourself if you're not using it since things are balanced around the fact that you are using that tool.

Take any sport, Basketball for example. If you had a special pair of sneakers that always scored any throw you made, it would make things a hell of a lot more certain. That guy making the throws now doesn't let down his whole team. Awesome for him.
Is the game better for it? I'm pretty sure that it's not...

Is WoW more fun now that we have an aggro meter?
I much prefered that there wasn't there and fights be more forgiving to compensate.

And an aggro meter didn't make me pump aggro better than before, if anything it decreased my overall aggro since now I know how far behind the first DPSer is and that I don't have to try as hard.

But we can just agree to disagree. I know I'm the minority here.