Your right, its the big chain stores that are sold out of the game. Were hears tons of storys about people going to Gamestop after Gamestop and not finding the game. Now i dont know a bunch on how chain buisnesses work, but if GS in a certain area are soldout, then i would assume other GS got similar shipments of game, and probably selling out as well.

I love this site, but it's rather comical to say you have "real retailer data" without ever providing any evidence of this data.  For all we know, bigjon's sample size is as large as VGC's.

So...game that sells well drops price, while game that is doing good but slowly gets more expensive?

First time I ever see this...

Price rises when demand > supply.

Now that probably means that sales are good, but it could just mean that they did not make enough copies.  Just because they are sold out, it is hard to say if that is 25K that sold out, or 250K that sould out...

If a game is doing poor/ok, so retailers keep little stock, and then suddenly has an increase in demand (from advertising, or because of holiday shopping season, or whatever), then yes the price can get more expensive until supply catches up with demand.

I think the game got adjusted up, it was at 250k last week, and it's now at 350k, and it sold around 40-50k this week(I don't exactly remember).

I was going to pick this up today at best buy but I could not find it there. They had plenty of copies of the HD ones though. I ended up buying ToS2 though, so I was not too upset. Hopefully I will get this for my birthday :)