According to GFI head of international licensing and acquisition, Inna Bukatina, Nintendo continues to “struggle” in the Russian market despite being the clear leader in every other market.
“Firstly people in Russia prefer products that are more universal, that can be used for a number of different purposes. For example, a PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable can be used for games, or films, and so on.”
“But the Wii is only for games, and for very specific kinds of games. The gaming society in Russia is pretty young, and I remember when Nintendo attempted to attract more people from older demographics - they put on their last slide a babushka, an old woman, in a headscarf sitting in the countryside and playing on a DS… but actually it’s very hard to see that really happening in Russia,” Bukatina says.
Result for: bush
Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter has forecasted that US video game sales will have jumped 47 percent year on year from March 2007 to March 2008 to $850 million USD.
More official NPD Group data will be available later this week, but Patcher also reported that the PlayStation 3 will have outsold the Xbox 360 but that both combined were outsold by the ever popular Nintendo Wii. He estimated the Wii sold 700,000 consoles for the month.
More interestingly, Patcher also reported that he belives “Nintendo is now diverting a significant portion of its supply to Europe due to the weakening dollar, but that the company did ship the US its “fair share” in March to support the launch of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.”
For April, Patcher feels sales will be just as high, fueled by titles such as “Army of Two” and “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2.”
Result for: bush
According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, PC game piracy will be a thing of the past thanks to new stealth encryption chips embedded in your computers.
“There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now,” he added.
“What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.”
Bushnell did note however that movie and music piracy can not be stopped. “If you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.”
“Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay.
“As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn’t make sense.”
