[Jarnis]

Big part of this "PC sales are down" is that nobody is tracking online (digital download) sales, and Steam & Direct 2 Drive keep their figures close to their vests.

Nobody is counting MMO subscription fees either.

These two chunks of cash, while probably not a majority _yet_, will be that in the very near future.

The statistic used (retail box sales) is getting obsolete, and while PC is the frontrunner, this is true even with consoles due to XBox Live Arcade and PS3 network thingy. Yet it is being pushed as the metric to follow - by the retailers, who face extinction in the mid-long term. You can be sure that GameStop and their kind will fight to their last breath to hold retail as the "real" sales channel. Remember - if game boxes go by the way of dinosaurs, their highly lucrative used game business will go byebye.

Ten years from now, we'll laugh at the idea of buying a box in a store to get a game as every console and computer will have terabytes of disk space, and bandwidth capacities are such that (re)downloading a 10 gigabyte game is something you can do while you eat your dinner...

In fact, if you want to see the future of game distribution, go get WoW trial. You'll be shocked how quickly you'll get to play the game... Same goes for direct online purchase of Guild Wars.

(Hint: In both cases, all you get is a downloader that quickly grabs the bits you need to start playing, and the system keeps downloading additional content as you play, and with a reasonably fast broadband, it could all be done seamlessly - as far as the player is concerned, it took him ten minutes to buy, download and start a game)

For PCs this is (slowly) happening today. For consoles, we need to wait for another console generation - possibly two, if old school retail dinosaurs lobby well - but it's coming.