Weekly Gaming News Roundup

Sales:

Media Create Sales Data Week: April 16th - April 22nd

The weekly Japanese console charts remain unchanged: The Nintendo DS is still dominating the charts with the Wii trailing behind with less than half of the sales. Meanwhile the PSP has established itself as the third power on the market. Sony’s PlayStation 3 is still only moving in moderate numbers.

Multiplatform:

JoWood, the Austrian publisher which bought Dreamcatcher recently, plans to expand its publishing activities to the consoles (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3). The publisher's portfolio contains brands such as the fast paced action FPS, Painkiller, the open ended RPG series, Gothic, and the RTS mixed with some CRPG elements, SpellForce.

The first games to be released from this console endeavour are scheduled for end 2008, early 2009.

PC:

Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward announced their next game last Saturday: but Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat. On a post in their forums, IW's Community Relations Manager states "Whatever we develop in the future, will always be on the PC. We're a PC developer, we just happened to add consoles to that resume as well, so no worries there. Infinity Ward is a PC developer." so good news for PC gamers which didn't get a chance to play Call of Duty 3, a console exclusive.

Nintendo:

Last week Nintendo announced its results for the fiscal year 2007. In the past year Nintendo sold over 23 million DS worldwide and another 5.84 million Wii consoles since its launch during Q4 last year.

Namco Bandai announced that it sold 80% of its 96% stake in the Japanese developer Monolith Soft to Nintendo. For information, Monolith Soft developed the Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos RPG series. It is currently working on a action/adventure game for the Nintendo Wii Disaster: Day of Crisis. This move may compliment Nintendo’s line-up in the RPG genre.

Finally, Famitsu conducted a video interview with the developers of Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (a subtitled version can be found here). The title allowing player’s to relive the scenarios of RE:0-1-2-3, will also explain the downfall of the Umbrella Corporation by revealing new storylines. According to the developers RE:UC transitioned from featuring similar controls to RE:4 to a on-rails shooter in order to ease difficulty and accessibility for Wii users. Similar concerns were also voiced in another video interview about RE:4 Wii Edition (a subtitled version can be found here). Obviously, Capcom operates under the assumption that most Wii users are either new to gaming or casual gamers and thus games should have lower barriers for those gamers.

Sony:

In a surprise management reshuffle Ken Kutaragi retired from his post as group chief executive officer at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and serves as Honorary Chairman of SCEI and senior technology advisor to Sony Corp, starting in June.

Moreover, SCEE unveiled the PlayStation Eye, the successor of EyeToy camera. The new peripheral is will be primarily used for “social gaming titles” employing similar principles like the EyeToy Play series, games with video chat capabilities and possibly new Web 2.0 based features, like Sony’s Grouper or EyeVio.

Also presented to the public this week was the Go!Cam, a portable camera for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, to be released on May 16th across Europe for €49.99 (£34.99). The camera features a built-in microphone and a lens with 180 degree rotation capability. Moreover, the camera is bundled with an edit software, called Go! Edit.

Microsoft:

Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division reported a net loss of $315 million during the third quarter FY 2007, compared to $402 million in corresponding time frame in the previous year. According to Microsoft they losses were due to the launch costs of the media player, Zune, and the extension of Xbox 360’s warranty from 90 days to 1 year.

In other news Microsoft's new Xbox 360 SKU, Elite, was finally officially released last week. Reportedly the Elite model also suffers from the dreaded '3 Rings of Death' malfunction, although Microsoft allegedly tried to solve the problem by fixating the CPU and GPU with epoxy glue.

Digitimes is reporting that Xbox 360 GPU, Xenos, is to be replaced by a 65nm version, to be manufactured by TMSC, come fall. Moreover, there is speculation whether or not the production of a shrunk eDRAM chip will be given to TMSC as well.