Sales of Nintendo's GameCube vidgame console rose 110% in February, more than 250,000 units in all, thanks to a promotion that gave away a copy of one of four top games with each purchase.
The GameCube trails Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox in U.S. market share. But giving away a title with each ma-chine purchase quickly boosted sales last month, the GameCube accounting for a fourth of all hardware sales in February.
The increase won't do much for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends this month, and which Nintendo said earlier would un-derperform expectations. But increased sales may boost Nintendo's profile going into May's Electronic Entertainment Expo, and persuade developers to continue making titles for the machine.
To further boost hardware sales and its bottom line, Nintendo has debuted the latest versions of the durable Pokemon fran-chise, "Ruby" and "Sapphire," after selling 4 million copies of the titles in the six weeks since their Japanese release. The fran-chise, though less omnipresent than a few years ago, generated $1 billion last year, Nintendo said.
Next week, the company will debut a new version of the handheld GameBoy Advance, the SP model, and the latest "Legend of Zelda" title, "The Wind Waker."
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Altnet said users of its peer-to-peer network have generated 75 million licenses for legal swapping of piracy-protected music, games and videos. The licenses, of 1,000 files, included 18 million in which the licensee actually paid money for the right to download material. The remaining 57 million were for promotional material or giveaways.
Altnet said it sold 25,000 units of 45 game titles, including some that were free elsewhere in unsecure formats.
Company operates over the controversial Kazaa peer-to-peer network, which has been sued by most of Hollywood and the music industry because it is widely used to download illegally copied versions of music and other material.
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