Industry
Nintendo and its ingenious plan to gimp online gaming
Nintendo and its approach to online gaming has been pretty perplexing to guys like us, huh? Friend Codes head us off at every pass like some small town sheriff drunk with power; servers groan and creak when we attempt to Brawl with friends and strangers alike; and don’t get us started on trying to chat in-game, right? Most of us are optimists, I’d like to think, and deep down we give N...
Wii reaches 22 million-sellers in 16 months
The sales-tracking website VGChartz.com is now reporting 22 Wii games have sold one million copies or more worldwide. LucasArts’ Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is the latest Wii game to go platinum, making it the ninth third-party game to reach this prestigious plateau. These figures sharply contrast criticism asserting Wii software has poor selling potential. For comparison, Microsoft...
Nintendo ramps up Wii Fit marketing, shifts industry yet again
Wii Fit is big in Japan (1.5 million sold in three months) and arguably will be as big if not bigger in the US when it goes live in a month or so (more people, more people who subscribe to new “weight loss” gimmicks, Wii’s existing momentum among people outside the now incorrectly described “core” or “traditional gamer”). But, just in case, Nintendo is all...
Video games in 2008: It’s great to be a gamer
The game industry is, undeniably, already well on its way into a new era. It is, like a certain presidential candidate, change we can believe in. It is both an exciting time (as a player) and an uncertain time (as a developer). But it is also a highly lucrative time, as is usually the case when truly disruptive trends begin to come to a head (see also, iPod). Hardware and software sales continue t...
Wii console sales boosted by casual, hardcore titles in Japan
Thanks to the one-two punch of titles like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and the quirky Wii Fit balance board, Nintendo has widened its lead in Japan over Sony’s PlayStation 3. According to an article from Reuters today, Nintendo’s Wii game console outsold the PlayStation 3 nearly 4-to-1 in Japan in February despite Sony’s console beginning to narrow the gap last autumn. In addition to...
Game Developers Conference Honors Nintendo with a Game Developers Choice Award
Some Nintendo-related awards news out of the Games Developers Conference this week: The 2008 Game Developers Conference has honored Nintendo with a Game Developers Choice Award. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo DS won for Best Handheld Game of the Year. The game continues to enjoy strong momentum in the U.S., with more than 1.1 million copies sold since its Oct. 1, 2007, release...
Nintendo praises Ubisoft for “getting” Wii
In a GDC interview with GameDaily this afternoon, Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat discussed Wii development and revealed some of the surprising praise Ubisoft received from Nintendo for its Nov. 2007 Wii release, My Word Coach. “We were working in secret on a game called My Word Coach…and we had the chance to show the game to (Nintendo of America President) Reggie Fils-Aime, and he ...
Carnival Games goes platinum
VG Chartz is reporting Carnival Games has surpassed one million copies sold worldwide. Released in Aug. 2007, the exclusive Wii minigame collection has since exceeded virtually all sales expectations despite receiving mediocre review scores. Carnival Games is currently averaging an aggregate score of 56 on Metacritic. Carnival Games was developed by Washington-based Cat Daddy Games, a studio prima...
Strong sales up Capcom’s financial forecast
Capcom announced yesterday a 15 percent raise in expected 2008 operating profit, elevating the company’s forecast to 11.5 billion yen. Capcom expects net sales of 81.6 billion yen and a net income of and 62 billion yen for the year. The company cited better-than-expected software sales as the reason for the boost, particularly noting the “robust sales” of Resident Evil: The Umbre...
Why do elite development teams avoid Wii?
Industry analysis and corporate hyperbole aside, there is something to be said for logic. Nothing deductive or philosophical, either. Just simple, basic logic. The kind of stuff kids learn between finger-painting and cookie breaks in first grade. Logic as it operates in the minds of seven-year-old boys; back then, we weren’t exactly sure what impact “cooties” would have on our health and we...
Opinion: Death to blockbuster AAA video game titles!
It doesn’t take much of a search of the Infendo archives to discover where I stand on big, bloated blockbuster titles like Halo 3 or Metal Gear Solid 4. To summarize, I think they’re pretty much the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Virtual Boy.
Should the original Nintendo Seal of Quality return?
Today Gamasutra asked a bunch of analysts if Nintendo should revisit the 1980s, when the Nintendo Seal of Quality actually meant something, and then apply that mindset to the Wii. Apparently, there’s a dearth of low-quality, sub par efforts on the Wii right now, and it’s officially time to completely forget the DS’s early track record and again start declaring to the hilltops tha...