Nintendo says that first-party game sales for the Nintendo 3DS were very strong in the first four months of 2013. The company claims that within that time period it moved more than 2.1 million units of first-party Nintendo 3DS software in the U.S, an increase of 52 percent over the same time period last year. In 2012, it took 30 weeks for Nintendo 3DS to sell 2 million units of first-party software, according to Nintendo. In 2013, the platform accomplished that same feat in 18 weeks.

Video game hardware and software sales were down by 25 percent during the month of April (April 4 - May 7, 2013) in North America, according to data released by the NPD Group. Excluding PC game sales numbers, the video game sector raked in $495.2 million.

Speaking to GamesIndustry International in a feature article this morning, Entertainment Software Association (ESA) senior vice president of communications and industry affairs Rich Taylor says that the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo next month is still relevant to the industry.

For the fiscal year that ended on March 31, publisher Take-Two recorded a loss of $31.2 million on revenue of approximately $1.2 billion, the company announced last night. For the fourth quarter, the company raked in revenue of of $299.5 million, up from $148.1 million from the same period a year ago. Net income for the quarter was $21.2 million, up from a net loss of $66 million from the same period a year ago.

A note to investors from financial analyst firm Cowen and Company predicts that NPD numbers will show a double digit decline in retails sales until the next Madden game hits store shelves, and that April will see a shortfall of 13 percent compared to last year.

UK Chancellor George Osborne and Culture minister Ed Vaizey said today that the European Commission's investigation into proposed tax incentives for the video game industry that have a cultural requirement will not stop UK lawmakers from providing games tax breaks. Speaking at the British Film Commission event for the launch of creative sector tax breaks for TV and animation, the pair showed that their support for tax breaks had not wavered.

According to data collected from a consumer survey conducted by research firm NPD Group, 72 percent of those who play games say that they do so online. The data comes from NPD Group's Online Gaming 2013 report, which surveyed 8,800 self-described gamers earlier in the year about their preferences and gaming habits.

GamesBeat has a partial edited transcript of a discussion that happened during the Social Casino Summit in San Francisco last week. The event was hosted by GamesBeat and Dean Takahashi. In the lead-up to the discussion Takahashi, who moderated it, notes that the social casino games sector may be small, but there are already more than 100 startups and big companies fighting with each other in the space.

Chucklefish's upcoming Starbound has managed to rake in over $1 million in pre-orders, the developer announced via its blog.  The game which is a Terraria-like 2D adventure RPG with a sci-fi theme, hit that milestone less than a month after the developer put up a tiered pre-order program to sell the game early.

2K Games will not be on the show floor at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo this summer, according to an announcement on its website. The company did not give any particular reason for not attending this year's show, only promising to release information on its slate of upcoming games later this spring.

EA's publishing label EA Partners is shutting down, according to a report on Game Informer. The label was used to sign and publish third party franchises such as 38 Studios' Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Valve's The Orange Box, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead franchise along with the Crysis series, the Rock Band series, Double Fine's Brutal Legend, APB, People Can Fly's Bulletstorm, Starbreeze's Syndicate, Suda51's Shadows of the Damned, and Hellgate: London.

The days of worrying about what mass consumers at big retailers like Wal-Mart think are over for his company, says inXile CEO Brian Fargo. After successfully funding two major role-playing game projects - Wasteland II and Torment: Tides of Numenera - on Kickstarter and through other payment methods, the gatekeepers are gone. Or more appropriately, the gatekeepers are now the players who actually want the kind of role-playing game that inXile wants to make and are willing to pay in advance to make it happen.

Nintendo released its earnings report for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013, revealing that it had taken a loss much like it did in the last fiscal year. Nintendo recorded a 36.4 billion yen operating loss ($366 million) for the fiscal year, with less than expected sales of the Wii U continue to have a "negative impact on Nintendo's profits." Thanks to a depreciation of the yen, Nintendo's net income was 7 billion yen ($71 million). Net sales for the year were forecast at 635.4 billion yen ($6.38 billion), down from the year before.

Like a few other game developers who have crowdsourced a project or made a lot of money through PayPal transactions, Skullgirls developer Lab Zero Games found themselves unable to pay employees during the weekend because the online money transfer service froze the developer's account.

In a blog post republished on Gamasutra, Barbara Jones (a shareholder in Greenberg Traurig’s Corporate and Securities practice group, a member of the Global practice group and the Emerging Technologies Team, and co-coordinator of the firm’s Conflict Minerals Compliance Initiative) discusses the video game industry's compliance with the Securities and Exchange Commission's new conflict minerals rules.

During its Q3 earnings report, Microsoft announced that Xbox live subscriptions have reached 46 million worldwide - an 18 percent increase from last year - and that it has sold 1.3 million consoles over the past three months - down nine percent from the same period a year ago. Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division revenues rose 56 percent to $253 million despite the drop in console sales.

Capcom is blaming development projects overseas for a revised financial forecast that takes into account a special loss due to game cancellations. The company said today that it will take a $73 million hit from cancelling various projects. The company also said that it will be making more of its games in-house due to a "drop in quality" from outsourcing projects to Western studios...

The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) announced this week that it will add a series of discussions on digital video game distribution and retailing to its upcoming 2013 Digital Media Pipeline conference, to be held Sept. 24 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The one-day event will bring together experts in the digital entertainment industry, including retailers, distributors, content aggregators, service providers and more.

GameSpot and other outlets are reporting that Electronic Arts continues to lay off its global workforce as part of a restructuring plan to streamline its development apparatus and (obviously) lower costs. According to MCV India the latest studio to be hit by layoffs is EA mobile development operations in India.

Responding to a bill proposed by New Jersey state Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Union) that would ban "mature" rated games from use in public spaces, Christopher Ferguson, a Professor of psychology at Texas A&M, told NBC that the bill is a typical waste of taxpayer money that capitalizes on a national tragedy to support a war against culture.

In a recent interview with Destructoid, Bethesda Softworks marketing vice president Pete Hines told the publication that used game sales are "absolutely" a concern for his company but that they have handled it by lessening the financial impact through lots and lots of DLC for its various games including Fallout 3 and the last few games in the Elder scrolls series.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said in a preview note sent out to investors late last week that not even a price cut to Nintendo's Wii U will help it sell more units. He also predicts that Nintendo will report another month of weak sales for the console later this week.

Dark Souls has now sold more than 2.3 million copies worldwide, according to developer From Software (by way of NeoGAF and Gpara). From Software president Eiichi Nakajima announced the sales figures on stage this week at an event for Japanese press, attended by Gpara. He also announced that the sequel to the popular hardcore action RPG, Dark Souls 2 would be coming to the Xbox 360.

UBM Tech announced that it will print the last issue of Game Developer Magazine in July, shutting down the publication dedicated to game developers of all stripes after a 19 year run. The parent company of the magazine and website Gamasutra did not disclose what will become of the magazine's staff at this point, though we do know that contributor Brandon Sheffield is out, as is Gamasutra news editor Frank Cifaldi.

A lawsuit filed by a former Zynga product manager claims that non-executive level employees were not allowed to sell stock in the company after Zynga's IPO in 2011 for 165 days, even as executives cashed out early. Former employee Wendy Lee goes on to claim that the 165 day window was lifted for executives, who doubled the proceeds from their sale of stock, while regular employees took sharp losses as Zynga's stock priced plummeted. By the time Lee was allowed to sell her shares Zynga's dropped by 49.3 percent.

The Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) is urging members of the Canadian games industry to take part in a survey to gauge the size, composition and economic impact on the country's economy. The survey has been available for awhile, but today's public service announcement extends it for an extra week. Results of the survey will be published within a few months of its competition on April 15.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus will take a salary of just $1 in 2013, according to Inside Social Games. We're not sure if this move by the social game giant's CEO is a publicity stunt to garner good will or not, but it's certainly a bold move by Pincus.

According to data from the 2012 Game Developer Salary Survey (which was published in the March issue of Game Developer Magazine) the number of women working in the games industry is growing, but salary gap between the sexes is still apparent.

According to the data women only had higher salaries in one of seven categories: programming and engineering, but programming and engineering also has the smallest number of women working in those professions at four percent. Women were also hard to find in the audio sector of the industry at around four percent.

During GDC last week in San Francisco research firms NPD, iResearch and Digi-Capital held a talk on digital games sales and revealed some interesting numbers on the space. According to data revealed during the event, digital game and downloadable content sales are growing at a rate of 33 percent year over year in the United States and Europe, while spending in China is expected to grow 10 percent annually for the next three years. Asia is going to be the most dominate region in the world when it comes to online and mobile games by 2016, according to the speakers.

Finland-based free-to-play game studio Supercell is valued at around $800 million after its latest funding round. The developer behind the hit F2P mobile titles Clash of Clans and Hay Day sold off between 16 - 20 percent of its common shares for an estimated $100 - $150 million. The word on the street is that the company's latest investors include Institutional Venture Partners, Atomico and Index Ventures. The company allegedly got close to being valued at an even $1 billion, but fell just short of the mark.