Sorry if someone already said this, I don't have time to read all the responses unfortunately, but couldn't it be that PSP hardware didn't increase because people are waiting for the bundle? I'm not saying that that would explain why they DROPPED, but it could explain why software wasn't as high as some people might have thought. and yes, illegal downloads probably hurt some too.

 God of War II should break 3 million before the end, just like the first God of War.  The game still costs $40.

A thought to consider, why would the "casual" gamer buy a game on a portable to sit in the chair at home to play it instead of playing a longer, bigger game on a bigger tv. When summer rolls around and people decide to take road trips or spring break and they are looking at a plane ride somewhere that psp is looking better and a good game like gow:coo could get some new life to fill those hours of boredom.

Then of course as mentioned the piracy. I realize a lot of those people wouldn't have bought the game anyways, but say that 25% would have bought that game, from the 200,000 downloads from someone's site, that is 50,000 sales lost plus however many more downloads from different sites.

Then there are people who would rather wait and get the gow bundle (and why not, it looks awesome) instead of picking up a psp right now to get their hands on this game.

Someone posted a listing of the average cost of developing a game on the psp in a different thread a few weeks back and the average cost (or so it claimed) for psp development was $700,000. Since this was a top of the line game you could probably put an extra $500,000 on that for a total of $1.2 million to develop this game and at $40 per that is easily recouped if this game has any legs at all especially since it hasn't been released in Europe yet. Yes I realize that Sony and Ready at Dawn and the store split that money or maybe Sony just gave Ready at Dawn a lump sum to develop the game and they get a bigger cut etc. but compaired to the development cost of PS2 games and the fact that GoW 2 originally started at $40 also it is not to hard to imagine that Sony gets the money back and therefore gow:coo didn't bomb.

piracy piracy piracy

illegal downloads etc.

150K first week on PSP, When was the last time you see that number for a PSP game?

I started a thread to make GoW a million seller, and it will reach that number. I don't know what your expectation is, but it seems to be doing just fine.

Another quick thought, it has been suggested several times in the few short weeks that I have been here that the psp software is under tracked. Don't know if it is true or not, maybe someone can make a quick run through of the NPD and compare it to VGC and see if it has any legitimacy to it.

Wow your ignorant op.

WTF did you people expect ?

Gow2 did 500k its first week on a 40 million user base.

Yeah, everyone pirate PSP games. Nobody pirate DS games. That must be the truth because PSP softwares aren't selling as well.

The correlation is also directly pointing at my gaming habit. I've been playing on my DS more often due to the PSP not selling as well. Therefore, lower sales on PSP is causing me to play on my DS.

I think the problem here is that this is yet another home console game made to play on a portable platform. That is just not the type of thinking that appeals to many portable owners.

Hey, I did my part by buying the game on day one.
Maybe the PS2 version will have better sales once they release it a little before GOW3 during the hype.
Anyways, it's a great game but really only lasted 4-5 hours at most, people know this, and that may have led to rentals or downloads. Either way, I quite sure this game WON'T have great legs since it's so easy to just download it.

@Galaki: Casual gamers don't know how to pirate games, nor do they buy PSPs. What does that tell you?