GameStop COO Dan DeMatteo anticipates shortages of the Nintendo Wii to continue for at least six months, MCV reports.

Speaking on an investor's conference call about inventory expectations in 2008, DeMatteo stated that he expects the retailer's supplies of the Nintendo Wii to fall short of demand for "the next two quarters at the least.

"Supplies have continually improved," DeMatteo added. "But we still don't know when supply will meet demand for the Nintendo Wii as they continue to sell out as soon as they hit the shelves."

Keeping up with outrageous demand for the Wii has proven difficult for retailers. Across the year of 2007, there were only three instances when the Wii and the Nintendo DS were not the month's top two best-selling pieces of hardware in North America.

GameStop CFO David Carlson added that the company also expects substantial price cuts for consoles in the coming year. "We've assumed a couple [of price cuts]," Carlson said. "The Xbox [360] and the PS3 have a $50 price cut sometime in the year. We have no knowledge or verification of those, but that's just the assumption we have used."

Video games retailer GameStop saw a 33% sales increase to a record $7.1 billion in the company's 2007 fiscal year, Gamasutra reports.

Officials from the company reported a $288.3M profit in its full financial year, a roughly 58% increase over its $158.3M profit in 2006. Sales figures in GameStop's fourth quarter saw a 46.2% increase, with profits from the holiday season accounting for $189.8M of the year's total.

In a drill-down of the data, GameStop noted that it sold roughly 546 million used video game products in its 2007 fiscal year, accounting for roughly 19% of total sales. Meanwhile, total revenue from used products clocked in at $262.2M, which represented 48% of the company's 2007 revenue.

The company was also named as the world's fastest growing retailer in the Fortune 500, with the opening of 586 new stores around the globe.

Reflecting data reported by the sales tracking firm NPD earlier this year, the company said that Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4, Harmonix's Rock Band, Ubisoft's Assassin’s Creed, Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy and Neversoft's Guitar Hero III were its five best selling games during the period.

New figures released in Activision's fiscal third quarter report reveals just how much cash the publisher raked in during the holiday season, as well as new details on its upcoming merger with Vivendi Games.

Activision's report states that net revenue for the third quarter clocked in at a record $1.48 billion, up 80% over figures of $824 million in 2007's holiday season. The company also raised its 2008 fiscal year net revenue outlook from $2.45 billion to $2.65 billion, driven by the industry-wide surge in sales figures and the success of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

The company also noted that its merger with Vivendi is proceeding as planned, and is currently waiting on clearance from several regulatory commissions and other protocol before the deal can be sealed. Activision anticipates the transaction to be closed in the first half of 2008.

In a conference call earlier today, Activision confirmed that it is planning on new entries in the Guitar Hero, Call of Duty and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series, as well as a reworking of the long-running Tony Hawk series.

Not a whole lot going down for the evening, if you're extra bored you can check out the 3dfx financial report as well as this VE article talking about the supposed demise of 3dfx. It's more of that T&L chest beating stuff which will certainly entertain the hardware buffs out there. My 2 cents, no single graphics card will dominate the market for 2 years anymore the market is a different place now. To draw such radical conclusions from the Voodoo4/5 announcement just boggles my mind. Of course that was the intent of the article to generate a response though eh? While we are on the 3fdx kick, Beyond3D has an explanation for just what the heck that Intel chip is people were wondering about in this picture of the Voodoo5 from Scott Sellers:

The purpose of the chip, according to Scott, 'is to isolate the AGP bus from the 4 chips on the V5 6000.  We need electrical isolation on the design, otherwise we would have too heavily loaded an AGP bus slot.  The Intel part serves as a bridge between the AGP bus and the 4 rendering engines...'

Oh, also Paul Steed sent me a few more videos for you guys showing off himself doing motion capture and then how it was plugged into a Quake3 character. Really pretty darn interesting. Gotta wait for the FTP situation to stabilize on that one though so we'll just shoot for tomorrow on that stuff.

update Jack Want my opinion on that article?  Too bad, you're getting it anyway :-)  For one, I love how press is really taking the T&L issue and running with it.  Is it important?  Yes.  Is it necessary yet?  That remains to be seen.  Until the technologies converge, developers will still have to write for people without T&L for awhile now, and that's not going to change.  At the same time, developers can't just cater to only a T-Buffer environment either.  And they simply don't have time to implement lots of either.

At the same time, 3dfx is going for some pretty high price points, but in the end that doesn't really matter either, as they're apparent stunning success in retail has still left them losing money overall.  The real issues about 3dfx at the moment have nothing to do with technology or retail pricing strategy, it has simply to do with the internals of the company trying to find and maintain a profitable business model in an industry where they're no longer the darling.  If technology were indeed the limiting factor, ATI would not be winning this war handily.  If retail really mattered right now, then 3dfx would be out on top.

But then again, there is the point brought up in the article about the juggernaut that is Glaze3D.  And that, my loyal readers, was sarcasm.