Actually I use the free PS+ games to play between my retail releases. Most of the time I get bored of them pretty quick. I downloaded Bioshock 2 a few days ago and haven't touched it since. Maybe its not my type of game? Maybe I'm too buy enjoying black Ops 2....retail is still king for me.

I REALLY enjoyed Borderlands though! The game really filled the gap for me until Black Ops 2 released. If I didn't have that maybe I would have bought a game at that time. Who knows...

No, my spending has gone up significantly. While I still use PS+ games, and have so many on my backlog that I can't play them, I still purchase games I want and will bite on the discounts they offer. Not to mention Sony is still getting my PS+ subscription fee.

Retail sales? Well, perhaps it's hurting retailers who would have sold a few more low priced physical copies of older games. As for Sony and the publishers/developers themselves, they're probably getting more or equal money this way. More importantly for publishers, more copies of games are getting into the hands of more players, which is excellent for when a sequel is being released.

I know people on gaming forums like to compare copies sold at retail as the only meaningful number but it's not really and is becoming less important of a number every day. Both digital distribution and gaming services like PS+ are going to make retail copies sold a decreasingly less valuable metric.

PS+ appears to be profitable for Sony, and from the games it ends up with every month, I'm guessing publishers and developers are happy with it.

Sony is actually making quite a bit of cash from PS+. Remember, when sony sells a third party game or even first party game at a retail store, they only get a small percentage of it. With PS+ they make the entire amount, which means $1-5 more than a retail game might be.

Actually i think it's the opposite...I believe the digital sales of games on PSN have gone up thanks to PS+.

I don't think so. This year looks like it's going to be the PS3's best year yet in terms of software sales. Or at least it'll be close.

It was a dull year, nothing to do with PS+.

I still buy all of the games that I'm interested in and PS+ has only given me one of those so far (King of Fighters 13). My tastes are too niche for Sony to anticipate them.

Who's buying these PS+ games new at this point? It's mostly cutting into the used market, one in which gamestop et al rake in the profits, not Sony.