Discounting prices via Steam and seeing a good uptick in cash generated makes a lot of sense. What doesn't make sense is dropping prices at retail - you have a lot more costs than Steam incurs when you sell something in a brick & mortar store - the store overhead, the retail & distributor discounts, and even things like the packaging of the title all suck up potential profit.

"anecdotal evidence" is where you non-systematically poll to get a read on what's happening in an industry.

In this case, it could have been something akin to:
We see more units availible for longer in store
We talked to a few distributors or retailers who said the supply problem was "getting better"

I'll admit - I prefer GameRankings as it's purely an average of all review scores (not weighted). The junky small time press / sites could artifically inflate / deflate a score for a short time, but overall the average evens out and you can say "if it's an 80+ on GameRankings, it's worth looking further into"

Why do people care so much about how yet ANOTHER FPS who will ultimately live or die based on it's multiplayer gets scored? Look at the metacritic score if you really want to gauge a game, or better yet play the demo or borrow / rent it for the night and see if YOU like it.

I'll give a game a try based on a really high rating, but I won't avoid games I'm looking forward to with low ratings (example: Project Sylpheed)

I know a lot of parents (myself included) who bought their kids DSs this year - they were availible and affordable. Hence one of the more popular DS games seeing a resurgence.