I wrote "nice week (for a dwarf)"   
Until more games are released for it and its price including a memory card will drop to more affordable levels, a week when it doesn't fall lower and insted it grows a little WW both in HW and SW can be considered a nice week. For a dwarf, obviously.   

Well 360 still has Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 to boost sales.

If you consider just home consoles, do things look better or worse? I got a feeling it looks worse...
Do you think there`s a chance price cuts will help or this late in their lifecycles, it won`t change things?

GT5

Sold 19,780 units in this week.

7,641,932 LTD.

592,040 in 2012.

Up from 39nd to 32nd.

GT5 on track to beat 2011 sales.

PS3 NEW MILLION SELLERS

143. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

IMVHO this late it won't raise sales much, but it will slow decline and extend consoles' life, while SW sales should be very healthy anyway, as long as new games are released, given the existing and still growing, although more slowly, user bases. Obviously when they'll want HW sales to grow again they'll need to launch next gen consoles and, if they want, cut this gen price again and keep on selling them as entry level. It's just like previous gens, except the gen's leader isn't anymore overwhelming like PS2 was or Wii itself was until two years and a half ago.

Price cuts do help raise HW but this time i think the effect will be short term. It`s been too many years without a price cut+too many years on the market for people to wait for it and then buy a console+a lot of sales last holiday season were due to price discounts.
I don`t know about software, but i was the impression that, overall, SW sales or sales revenue has come down aswell.
PS2 sold, if i remember correctly, about 50 million consoles after PS3 came out and of course i believe all consoles will still sell after next-gen kicks in. Problem is, no console, not even Wii, is at the level of PS2 to keep on selling for that long and that well. PS2 was something special.
Xbox 360 and PS3 and their successors will go for the exact same market and many people will just opt for the new consoles and leave very little room for Xbox 360 and PS3 to keep on selling. That, or they will hamper PS4 and Xbox720.

Yes, a possible sales rise will be short-lived, but the effect of delaying the decline will last longer, extending their life.

Wii is already cheap, so there's not much anymore that a price cut can do for it, particularly if there are too few new games and too few 1st party classic budget priced, but PS3 is still quite expensive, and XB360 too, if bundled with kinect and/or if the buyer wants a version with a HDD, price drops can still expand their audiences  a little bit if games keep on coming. We won't see PS2 or DS numbers, but they can both reach a 9 years or more market life and 90M or more lifetime sales.

When both XB360 and PS3 will be cheap, their markets, big or little that it be, won't be the same of latest gen, full-priced consoles. But with more games released and a vast library of budget edition classics aimed at their new audience, they'll be able to sell better than what Wii is doing now (but Wii could remain the gen winner, thanks to the huge lead earned during its first years of monster sales).

And both XB360 and PS3 will need another price drop after the next one to have a chance to sell more than 100M lifetime, they'll both need to unlock another part of their potrential market. Also, to avoid possible cannibalizing damages to PS4 and XB720, current gen consoles will have to be positioned very far away from them on the market, both in price and HW power, and on this issue a Q4 2013 or later launch should help MS and Sony a lot.

About the extending the life cycle... i really don`t know about that.
The thing about price helping expand audiences is that although we have seen that in past generations, this generation has been abnormal, in a way. By this time everyone would have new consoles on the market and the last generation would be 99$ or less on the market. But what we see is that none of that happen and isn`t even close to happen. So the question is: that normal 99$ market is still there and how big is it?
Prices have remained so high for so long that there`s a risk that people just gave up on waiting (a fraction of it, that is). I think Wii, this holiday season will be the proof of how big that market is. Last holiday Wii sold very well but Nintendo probably has Walmart to thank with it`s 99$ promotion. This year pretty much everyone will be using that price if there`s no official price cut.
The same goes for the HD twins who saw not only discounts but packed in games to go with the discount. If all we see this year, in official price drops ends up being a repetition of last year´s holiday prices', i don`t really know how lasting or how broading can the effects of a price cut be seeing as a portion of that market was eaten last year.

A 99$ price tag doesn`t garantee "everlasting" sales even if at a slow pace.
What i have been seeing since the N64 days is that only PS1 and PS2 have seen support by retailers mainly because there were a lot of games available and they were the market choices of their generation. And if you remember only one of each generation survived at 99$; the other two ended their lifes shortly after their successors arrived on the market.
In this generation, Wii is the market choice and will also be 99$ very soon, i think, and that might just be it`s strong point: establishing itself soon as the cheap console of choice at 99$ (or less) which might even help sustain a good software market for a few years seeing as developing for Wii isn`t expensive.
Of course, this is what i believe it will happen.

Xbox 360 and PS3 at 99$ will eat into each other`s market... as usual.
That`s why i believe they will both be short lived at 99$. That and the fact that none of them dominate both markets: US belongs to Xbox 360 and Europe to PS3. While in the time of PS1 and PS2, both consoles dominated both markets which helped sales after their respective successors arrived. In a way there were more people to sell them to.
The market hasn`t seen two consoles, who go after the same market, be alive at the same time after they become old-gen... at least i can`t remember a case of that happening.

I agree on your points and I agree that price cuts, even with enough games, won't let them reach PS2. But considering their current lifetime sales PS1 is at reach, Not guaranteed, but reachable if they don't commit too many mistakes. But to confirm or deny anything we'll have to wait for cuts to actually happen and Wii U to launch and see their short, and mid term effects. In the longer term also PS4 and XB720 will matter and unless a miracle happen, we already know PS3 and XB360 won't repeat PS2's stellar performance even after this gen's launch was completed. Alas VGC's charts don't offer anymore data on the old platforms except HW and SW lifetime totals (and not only new data on them aren't released anymore, but PS2, GC and XB even disappeared from existing charts where they were present, existing detailed data on them have been removed), otherwise we could compare PS1, PS2, GC, XB, XB360 and PS3 lifetime, yearly and weekly sales at the same point in their respective lifecycles, to try and position their respective trends...   
Just one thing: the three competitors are much more even than in past gens, but even right now current gen is already bigger overall than past gen in its entire lifecycle, we complain about sluggy sales, but this gen is already over 220M home consoles sold while last gen hasn't reached 200M yet (but PS2 is still selling, maybe it could still happen): this tells us that the overall home consoles market has already grown more than 10% bigger than last gen and it's still growing, although slower than at its peak. We get a pessimistic picture because we compare this gen YoY with itself, but if we could compare it YoY with last gen and also the one before we could see that PS2's single console peak is far away, but the overall yearly and lifetime maxima of all consoles put together are reached by this gen.