Is… is it November already? Time really flies when you’re anticipating a new generation of video game consoles…

• Nintendo have released online digital sales figures for the first half of their financial year, and the results are impressive. The company set a new record for digital sales, managing to bring in ¥11.6 billion (US$146 million). That beats out sales for the entire previous financial year. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata also pointed out that half of this was digital sales of games with retail releases. The company also announced Wii U hardware sales of 460000, and maintains a full year target of 9 million units. The 3DS saw a decline in sales, but Nintendo still expects to sell five million units in Japan this year.
• Streaming site Twitch.tv has announced a partnership with Mojang to bring integrated streaming to Minecraft. This will allow Minecraft players to stream directly from within the game. Twitch’s VP of Marketing, Matthew DiPietro says to “expect a watershed moment for both players and spectators once the ability to easily broadcast gameplay directly to Twitch goes live.”
• IGN spoke to Microsoft’s Phil Spencer regarding three well-liked but somewhat forgotten franchises on the XBox and XBox One. The interesting portion of the article concerns the Project Gotham Racing series, which Spencer said he discussed often with Turn 10 head Alan Hartman. According to Spencer, “I think the Kudos system that we had in PGR was the real secret sauce. I thought that was the thing that people really loved.”
• Undead Labs has confirmed that its zombie-survival sandbox game State of Decay will be fully released on Steam this Tuesday.
• You can now pay for things on your PS3 using PayPal, which is nice.
• Blizzard have released their classic platformer Blackthorne for free. If you have a Battle.net account, you can log into it right now to download the game (for Windows only) and start playing.

This week’s cover image is Rainbow Dash because horses. ©Hasbro.