Toy’s R Us Find’s Wii Profitable

The success of the Nintendo console, the Wii, has proven to change the industry in many new and creative ways including reinvigorating slow product sales at Toys R Us. “The company went from a loss of $42 million at the same time last year to a profit of $13 million for the three months ended August 2nd,” says Gamasutra who spoke with CEO Gerald Storch.

Revenue was up 6.3%, in part, thanks to the Nintendo and its hot moving Wii and Wii Fit products. While Nintendo struggles to supply enough units for the strong demand, Toys R Us has no problem emptying their stores of any hardware they receive.

Months after the Wii launch we witnessed parents waiting in lines before the store opens just to see if they had Wii’s arrive for the opening. Although we’re sure it was a hassle to answer the phones with the typical response, “no, we’ve got no Wii’s in stock,” the long term plan has proven successful.

Have you finally managed to get yourself a Wii? Did you pick it up at Toys R Us?

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Episode 580: Virtual E3Episode 580: Virtual E3

Publishers are doing their virtual E3 announcements, such as Ubisoft Forward and ID@Xbox’s Indie Showcase. There’s other wild news going on, and some not even in the official news items below.

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Are Game Controllers Too Complicated?Are Game Controllers Too Complicated?

The same company that brought us the NES Advantage has proven the Wii control scheme isn’t as bad as critics speculated. The beauty of adding the “waggle” technology is limiting your button count to a reasonable level without overwhelming gamers.

We’re seeing casual gaming on the rise both in the press and in the public. Yet, each “next generation” console brings new features and functionality to the consoles, games and accessories. Since NES birthed the SNES we’ve seen button count increase on controllers.

Nintendo has usually been conservative on buttons, trying to work “shape” over sheer volume of buttons, barring the C button count on the N64 controller. Nintendo controllers change shape with each generation and they’ve evolved, not innovated, their way around with the Wii control scheme. Each function of the controller exists, on its own, in other products but nobody has built a fully functional controller in such a way for a game console until now.

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Episode 734: Third Party ShowcasesEpisode 734: Third Party Showcases

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Among the discussions are the original 1997 Backyard Baseball finally coming to Steam, the original Horizon Zero Dawn removed from Epic Games Store, Hi-Fi Rush 2 already in development six months when Krafton acquired Tango Gameworks and Mario + Rabbids director and Red Dead Redemption lead designer found new studio Day 4 Night.

The news includes:

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Let us know what you think.

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