Nintendo has a message for its third-party partners—there’s still plenty of room in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Speaking Tuesday with the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo of America president Reggie-Fils Aime said he hopes to increase the percentage of Wii games published by third-party companies by 15 percent.

Fils-Aime’s goal would raise the third-party Wii share from 55 to 70 percent, roughly the same as the split for the Nintendo DS.

In addition to improving publisher relations, increasing the third-party presence on Wii would also strengthen the diversity of games available, a cyclical benefit Fils-Aime says helps sell Wii hardware.

“In order to achieve high levels of sales of hardware, we need all genres in the market,” Fils-Aime told the Wall Steet Journal.

(more…)

Like rustling leaves freed by an October breeze, blockbuster games will be falling from store shelves into consumers’ hands all autumn long.

Or so hopes David W. Carlson.

The executive vice president and chief financial officer of GameStop, Carlson said Thursday the company expects to finish 2009 strong thanks to a Q4 release list including, among major multiplatform titles, “a couple” unannounced Nintendo games.

Carlson highlighted October releases such as Tekken 6 and BioShock 2 during GameStop’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday as titles the company expects will help it reach its full-year earnings guidance.

“Then going into November (we expect) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2,” continued Carlson. “And we believe there’s a couple of Nintendo titles coming that have not been announced.”

“So it looks like…a very, very strong fall and holiday season.”

An IGN editorial made the Digg homepage over the weekend and subsequently has been making the online rounds. The piece examines “the biggest threats to Nintendo’s success in 2009,” but I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed after skimming it. It’s a great topic, but IGN’s reasonings seem irrelevant. Here’s why: (more…)

Dear readers,

In an effort to optimize advertising page views to grow our little site, we’ve begun using multi-page articles on Infendo this month. We’re still working on where they make the most sense, but in the future, we plan on adhering to the following guidelines:

1. For short news articles and blog posts, will we continue using the “continue reading”  links on the home page, like we’ve done in the past.
2. For longer news articles that announce several things, like this, we will use no more than two pages.
3. For feature stories and listicles like this, we will fragment articles with pages as much as it makes sense for copy flow, various images, and multiple videos.

(more…)

EA today released a fresh batch of screenshots for Madden NFL 10 on Wii. Reactions to the first screen were mixed. But keep in mind Madden die-hards will stick to Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. The Wii version is obviously trying to do something new. For EA, the Wii version is all about growth, as the status quo design has grown stagnant in recent years. Still big, but stagnant. Madden NFL 10 arrives August 12.

If the sticky, color-spewing de Blob were to splatter paint upon the THQ offices, he would color them green.

A pale, cash-like shade, that is.

CEO Brian Farrell said Tuesday his company’s colorful Wii platformer has sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide to date.

The game’s success has enabled THQ to keep de Blob at its original price point. After five months at retail, de Blob still sells for $49.99.

“We can make money on games like that,” said Farrell.

(more…)

Nintendo gets what Nintendo wants.

The Tokyo District Court granted an injunction yesterday against sales of the R4 DS cartridge in Japan.

The original lawsuit was filed last July, when Nintendo and 54 game companies, including Capcom, Square Enix, SEGA and more, pushed for the cease of marketing, sales and importation of the Chinese-made cartridges.

Nintendo had expressed an interest in the cart in Nov. 2007, when a spokesman said the company is “keeping a close eye on the products and studying them.”

(more…)

Curiosity got the best of me this morning, and I wandered into my local Wikipedia library for unofficial numbers on the best selling video game systems of all time. According to the wisdom of the crowd, they are as follows:

1. PlayStation 2 (Sony) — 140 million
2. Game Boy (Nintendo) — 119 million
3. PlayStation (Sony) — 102 million
4. DS (Nintendo) — 96 million
5. Game Boy Advance (Nintendo) — 81 million
6. NES (Nintendo) — 62 Million
7. PlayStation Portable (Sony) — 50 million
8. SNES (Nintendo) — 49 million
9. Wii (Nintendo) — 45 million
10. N64 (Nintendo) — 33 million

Combined, Nintendo and Sony really clean up, don’t they?

The most successful video game company on the planet has hired a company to help them sell video games.

Irony doesn’t get much more ironic than that.

On the Feb. 9 episode of IGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat podcast, IGN editor Daemon Hatfield claims Nintendo has hired a San Francisco marketing firm to help the Kyoto-based juggernaut sell Wii games.

“I met someone over the weekend who works for a marketing firm in (San Francisco), and Nintendo is one of their clients,” says Hatfield 47 minutes into the show.

“He told me…Nintendo is hiring them to figure out how to sell more games to Wii owners. Nintendo is saying Wii owners are not buying many games; they’re just playing Wii Sports.”

(more…)

More than half a million Americans lost their jobs last month. If sales trends reflect reality, most coped by getting drunk and killing aliens.

As vehicle manufacturers and major banks crumble amidst the worst economic environment since the Great Depression, U.S. sales of video games and alcoholic beverages have increased by record amounts.

The video games industry is on pace to total a record $22 billion in U.S. sales this year, success that has been widely documented.

Meanwhile, several states are reporting strong increases in liquor sales during the 2008 fiscal year, Pennsylvania and Utah included. Ohioans bought enough liquor to fill more than 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools, a recording-breaking year of consumption.

And November data suggests the trends aren’t slowing; Americans seem to be gearing up for a holiday of drunken family gaming.

(more…)