Last month in Japan, the Xbox 360 outsold the PlayStation 3, partly attributed to the American console's price cut.

Good news, if rental-by-mail is your preferred means to get games: "GameFly, the leading online video game rental service, today announced the launch of GameFly Mobile, powered by Usablenet, which brings the GameFly experience to mobile users."

Senior Vice President of Marketing Tony Key, speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle:

We found through research that girls are gamers; they just aren't traditional gamers. Girls are clearly interested in playing video games. They just don't want to play the same games their brothers play.

Since 2004 Ubisoft has, of course, fielded three teams under the brand Frag Dolls — designed to build equity through unisex competition on FPS titles, and by all appearances marketed primarily to twentysomething males. But with Key attributing girls and women to nearly a quarter of Ubisoft's revenue, and the company inaugurating a campaign to deploy lighthearted franchises, might another personalized outreach — this time with strictly casual and sororal appeal — be somewhere in the concept stage?

The Wii Speak Channel and peripheral, Wii Music, Animal Crossing: City Folk and at least five WiiWare titles are all in the wings. While there's opportunity to poke fun at Nintendo finally granting Wii owners the "ability to use the Wii console to chat with friends near and far" — welcome to November 2002! — financial numbers are more than enough to justify Nintendo's indifference to convention.

Well, it's hardly a step in the wrong direction: "[W]e're trying to protect something that we spent a lot of money developing, but not prohibiting somebody who bought a legitimate copy from getting into the game and having fun right away."