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Nintendo introduces game console at a discount to competitors, sees brisk initial sales.

Thousands of video game fans flocked to midnight store openings across Europe as Japan's Nintendo Co. Ltd. launched its GameCube console Friday at a sharp discount to its rivals.

Nintendo, which has shipped 500,000 machines for the European debut, said it sold 10,000 in Britain in the first two hours Friday. The launch has been backed by a 100 million euro ($90.7 million) marketing blitz.

The Japanese company, which cut the retail price of its console two weeks before the launch, had registered 50,000 pre-orders for the machine in the United Kingdom, said David Gocen, managing director of Nintendo Europe.

GameCube retails for a little more than $180 (€199) in Europe and Britain, about $90 below rival machines such as the Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's (MSFT: Research, Estimates) XBox. Console makers traditionally sell machines at a loss and earn profits on games that sell at around $58.47 (€60) each.

Some 20 games are already available (among the tiltles are hits like Luigi's Mansion, Super Monkey Ball, Tony Hawk 3, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II, Wave Race and Crazy Taxi). The number of games will rise to around 50 in the next couple of months.

News source: CNN

Will Poole, a vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows New Media Platform Division, said he wasn't sure whether Bay's strategy was ever adopted.

However, later in 1999, Microsoft integrated Netshow into the Windows Media Player that is bundled into every copy of Windows.

"You wanted to integrate the media player deeper into Windows in the same way Microsoft integrated Internet Explorer into Windows?" states' attorney John Schmidtlein asked Poole.

"The point was...to communicate the entire breadth of Windows technologies that were available," Poole replied.

"There are aspects of the battle that were very similar to Netscape. There are aspects of the battle that were very different," Poole said.

Poole told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that RealNetworks was the dominant media-playing software despite its complaints about Microsoft.

"The inclusion of multimedia technology in Windows has not impeded RealNetworks' ability to create competing media players that run very well on Windows and to distribute and promote those media players broadly to users," Poole said.

RealNetworks Vice President David Richards testified in March during the hearings that Microsoft had withheld technical data from RealNetworks to ensure that its player would not work as well with Windows as the Windows Media Player.

The nine states want Microsoft to provide a version of Windows in which add-on features like the media player can be easily removed to level the playing field for Microsoft's competitors.

These states, including California, Connecticut and Iowa, have rejected a proposed settlement reached between Microsoft and the U.S. Justice Department in November. The proposed settlement would let computer makers promote rival software by hiding--but not removing--certain Windows features.

Microsoft has said its Windows program is a tightly bound set of components that rely on one another to work properly.

Making the Windows Media Player removable might be good for Microsoft competitors such as RealNetworks, Poole said.

"I am confident that it would not be good for developers of software and Web sites that rely on (media) functionality in Windows or for consumers generally because the performance of their programs would be degraded," Poole said.

The hearings on the non-settling states' demands are now in their seventh week. Kollar-Kotelly is also weighing whether to endorse the proposed DOJ settlement signed by nine other states that were party to the original case.