Nintendo plans to increase production of its six-year-old Switch console in the coming fiscal year after shipping roughly 21 million Switch consoles in the year ending March, according to people familiar with the matter.

Nintendo will ramp up output of the Switch to about 30 million units this fiscal year, Nikkei has learned, marking an all-time high for the flagship gaming device in a bid to capitalize on continuing stay-at-home demand.

Sony has delayed hosting a showcase event for its next games console.

Nintendo is likely to struggle to supply sufficient Switch consoles to its US and European markets as soon as April due to a production bottleneck caused by the coronavirus outbreak, according to people with knowledge of the company's supply chain.

It's a time of optimism and transition at Nintendo, where brisk sales of the Switch have bolstered its bottom line and new leadership signals a fresh approach to the market. Shuntaro Furukawa, the new president, told the Nikkei that one of his plans is to pursue mobile gaming with more vigor, aiming to build it into a billion-dollar business.

Nintendo's latest videogame machine, the Nintendo Switch, is winning fans for both its lineup of popular games and its flexibility-it works as both a living-room console and a hand-held device.

Nintendo will release its long-awaited new console, the Nintendo Switch, on 3 March. It will cost US$299.99 in the US and JPY29,980 yen in Japan.

Microsoft will no longer make new Xbox 360 units, the Redmond, Calif.-based firm announced Wednesday. However, it will keep selling existing stock.

Japanese newspaper Nikkei has published a rumor that the Wii U will soon be ceasing production to make way for the upcoming NX. Nintendo is now denying that report.

Long-serving Nintendo executive Tatsumi Kimishima will be appointed president of the firm following the death in July of Satoru Iwata.

Japanese videogame maker Nintendo made its first annual operating profit in four years, which beat its forecast as well as the market's.

The next-generation games machine will become available in North America on November 15 and Europe on November 29.

Promising change and announcing a string of goals, Sony's chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, detailed on Thursday a revival plan that included a shift away from the company's unprofitable TV business and a plan to cut 10,000 jobs.

Cisco came up with an interesting prediction in its latest forecast of global mobile data traffic: by the end of this year, there will be more Internet-connected mobile devices than people on Earth.

Nintendo has forecast its first annual loss in at least 30 years after the yen reached a postwar high and the new 3DS console had weaker-than-expected sales.

Judge E. James Gildea found that Apple infringes US Patent No. 6,658,146 directed to systems and methods for compressing images and US Patent No. 6,683,978 directed to image data formats, both of which belong to S3 Graphics. In the industry, that technology is known as S3 Texture Compression (S3TC).

ARM has said that within 18 months its Mali GPU will be able to match the power of Sony's Playstation 3 or Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that Moore's Law was not the only way to achieve that.

"Nintendo 3DS has not been selling as expected since the second week [of availability], and this is not just in the Japanese market but also in the US and Europe, where no direct impact from the great earthquake has occurred," said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

Video games giant Nintendo has seen its annual profits slump by 66%, hurt by a strong yen and a drop in sales.

"US day-one sales numbers for Nintendo 3DS were the highest of any Nintendo hand-held system in our history," Nintendo said in a statement. The company promised more detailed stats on April 14, when NPD Group will release a report about the month's video game sales.

Microsoft may be struggling against Apple and Google to win the hearts of consumers, but the company can take pride in at least one achievement: Kinect, its hands-free controller for the Xbox 360, is now the world's fastest-selling consumer electronics device.

Nintendo says it will ship about 1.5 million units of its 3DS console in the first month after debut, promising to avoid the huge shortages seen with the launch of earlier versions, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told the Nikkei in an interview ahead of the February 26 release in Japan of the device.

Nintendo warned that young children shouldn't play three-dimensional games on a hotly anticipated new game device, citing possible health risks and raising concerns about a technology that many hoped would boost the appeal of 3-D entertainment in the home.

Sony Computer Entertainment chief Kaz Hirai has said that the next PSP could boast both a touch screen and conventional controls to give casual and hard-core gamers the opportunity to play titles in a way they prefer.

A Wolfson audio chip is included in Samsung's soon to be released smartphones, Wave and Galaxy S. Edinburgh-based Wolfson Microelectronics makes microchips for mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles.

Consumers are changing buying patterns, placing a new emphasis on value and gravitating toward products that promise to improve their lifestyles, such as netbooks, portable navigation devices (PNDs), digital TVs, DVD recorders and video game consoles.

Sony narrowed its full-year loss forecast, as cost reductions more than offset a stronger yen and lower sales of televisions and cameras. The net loss will probably be 95 billion yen (US$1 billion) in the year ending March 31, compared with an earlier projection for a 120 billion yen loss.

The cell chip in Toshiba's TV is the same as the one in Sony's PS3.

Sony Entertainment has announced it is reducing the price of its PlayStation 3 games consoles. In Europe the price has been lowered to 299 euros, in the US to US$299 and in the UK to £249.99.

Global sales of Nintendo's Wii console have passed 50 million, the company's boss Satoru Iwata has said. The Wii is now the fastest-selling games console in history, surpassing the PlayStation 2.

A startup called Zeebo is betting that people in emerging markets want to play good video games just as much as people in the US, Western Europe and Japan do. Zeebo plans to launch its "video game console for the next billion" in Brazil next month for US$199 and other countries later in the year for US$179. It was developed using the cell phone technology of Qualcomm.

The Sony PlayStation 2 debuted in 2000, before the beginning of the Bush administration, when Google Inc. was still a private search startup and the iPod and Windows XP hadn't been born. Yet despite its age in a business obsessed with the new, the video game console remains a big seller today. In fact, Sony Corp. announced Tuesday that it has sold 50 million PlayStation 2 units in North America.

Sony is likely to announce closures of Japanese factories and major divisions early next month, the Times of London said on Monday, but the company denied any such plan existed. The maker of Bravia flat TVs and PlayStation video game consoles faces halting sales and mounting piles of inventory in the wake of the financial crisis, even as a stronger yen bites into earnings.