One 
of the tentpole events of E3 won’t be taking place this year.
Nintendo shocked the gaming world late Wednesday by announcing that it has decided not to hold its annual E3 press conference. Instead, the company said, it plans to focus on smaller events and will address the gaming world through a series of Nintendo Direct broadcasts, essentially cutting out the large, noisy middleman.
If 
there was any remaining doubt that the Wii U has been struggling, Nintendo erased that in its latest earnings report.
The company reported that in the past three months, it has sold just 390,000 units of its next generation console. Life to date sales for the Wii U are under 3.5 million. That’s more than 500,000 less than the company had predicted in January, a figure that had been revised downward from initial forecasts of 5.5 million.
Last 
August, Nintendo began to more fully embrace digital distribution as a way to get games in people’s hands – a notable shift for a company that had previously stayed an arm’s distance from the online world.
The experiment is paying off. Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, says digital downloads are fast becoming a notable contributor to the company’s bottom line – and he expects the trend to continue its rapid rise.
It 
might be the year of Luigi, but another green-garbed Nintendo mascot stole the spotlight Wednesday as Nintendo announced a slew of upcoming titles.
An all-new The Legend of Zelda game set in the world of 1991’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is scheduled to launch for the 3DS this holiday season. Also on the way are new entries in the Yoshi’s Island and Mario Party series, as well as the U.S. arrival of the cult-classic Earthbound, the company announced in a direct broadcast to fans.
It 
hasn’t been a smooth ride for Nintendo’s Wii U. It’s premature to call the system a flop, but it’s undoubtedly been a disappointment thus far.
Nintendo’s new console system had a decent start, selling 463,000 systems in December of last year, but that paled compared to the 890,000 Wiis that were sold during that console’s debut. Worse yet, the Wii U sales drop since then has been dizzying. In January and February combined, only 112,000 Wii Us were sold, according to The NPD Group. To put that in perspective, the Wii sold 683,000 in that time frame. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have thoroughly outsold the Wii U in 2013.
A 
U.S. District Court is ordering Mario to cough up some gold coins.
A federal jury in New York has found Nintendo guilty of infringing on a key patent in the creation of its 3DS handheld system and has ordered the game maker to pay over $30 million in damages.
For 
over three decades, Mario has been the hero of Donkey Kong.
But when Mike Mika’s daughter didn’t understand why she couldn’t play as damsel-in-distress Pauline in the coin-op classic, the Oakland father turned the tables on the plumber — and hopped away as a shoo-in to win a few Dad of the Year awards.
Nintendo 
has a problem on its hands.
The Wii U, in its second full month of availability, sold a paltry 57,000 units in the U.S. according to data from The NPD Group. That’s substantially fewer than its predecessor and well under half the number analysts were expecting for the month. And it props opens the door — and perhaps issues a warning — for Sony and Microsoft, which are both expected to roll out new consoles this year.
It’s 
much too early to dub Nintendo’s next-generation videogame system a failure, but it’s certainly off to a lousy start.
The Wii U sold just 46,000 hardware units in January at brick and mortar locations — a shockingly low number for a console that was just released in late November. To put it in perspective, the Wii sold 348,000 units during that system’s comparable period in 2007.
If 
you look at the raw numbers, it would appear that the video game industry halted its two-year sales decline in January — but numbers can be deceiving.
Video game software sales were up 1 percent in January as compared to a year ago and hardware sales climbed 4 percent, according to the NPD Group. Before you break out the bubbly, however, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Chris Morris: Journalist 