GameStop has been making news lately but mostly for all the wrong reasons. Earlier in the year, it released Stardock and Big Huge Games' Demigod before the official date, leading to extended piracy of the title and to problems from those engaging in multiplayer.

On Friday, the retailer also broke the street date for Point Lookout, one of the downloadable content packs for Fallout 3. But GameStop is keen on putting those incidents behind it as it points to the good year it is set to have in 2009.

After a meeting with four GameStop executives, analyst Arvind Bhatia said that the retailer was expecting both Sony and Nintendo to cut prices on the PlayStation 3 and on the Wii and that digital distribution would not become a threat to brick and mortar game stores during 2009.

It seems that the PS3 100-dollar price drop should coincide with the release of EA Sports' Madden NFL 10, which is coming in the middle of August, and that the Wii will get its price reduced in time for the crucial Christmas shopping season.

GameStop is predicting that the best sellers of 2009 will be titles like Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3: ODST, Guitar Hero 5, The Beatles: Rock Band, BioShock 2, and Assassin's Creed 2. August is seen as being the first month during which revenue from the videogames industry should rise.

When it comes to digital distribution of videogames, GameStop believes that it costs too much money to set up the infrastructure needed and that the market is still too small to support it. The company is estimating that only in 2014 will digital distribution get to a point where it is significant enough to threaten traditional sales of videogames. GameStop also claims that consumers are only willing to pay 39 dollars for a digitally downloaded game, which will make publishers less interested in the technology.