Some may know Denise as that lady who replaced Nintendo fanboy icon Perrin Kaplan in the job. Others may know her as that lady who played splish-splash with Totilo, as both tried really hard to pretend Times Square was somewhere a little more tropical.

Either way, she’s gone. Kaigler cites personal reasons for the departure (she lives in New England, Nintendo lives on the other coast), with today her final day in the job.

In a statement issued to Kotaku, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing, Cammie “Smile Machine” Dunaway, says “Denise Kaigler has been a valuable part of the Nintendo of America team for the last two years. She’s made a personal decision to spend more time with her family in New England. We wish her all the best in this next chapter of her life, and we look forward to continuing to deliver great Nintendo experiences to people of all ages as we head into this holiday season”.

Best of luck, Denise.

This is interesting because, as MacWorld points out, smaller developers had welcomed Android as an alternative to the sometimes inscrutable policies and decisions of the iTunes App store. Not Gameloft (though hardly a “smaller developer”), which says it sells “400 times more games on iPhone than Android,” according to the finance director Alexandre de Rochefort, speaking at an investor’s conference.

Moreover, “we have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Rochefort said, as reported by Reuters. “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.”

Reuters says that iPhone applications generated 13 per cent of Gameloft’s revenue in the last quarter.

Gameloft Says It, Others Reining in Android Plans [Reuters via MacWorld]

And they are. An LA Times report on the game’s launch says the game “cost $US40 million to $US50 million to produce”. That’s, uh, a lot. Gran Turismo 5 has cost $US60 million so far, but that game’s been in development for five years, not the two it took to get MW2 out the door.

So, yes, if you were wondering how Activision got so much detail, Fiddy and Keith David into the game, that’s how they did it. By throwing money at it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 video game gets Hollywood-scale launch [LA Times]

Take this one, for example. It’s been put together by The Business Insider, and charts the decline in video game sales since 2007. As it says, it’s based on a year-to-year percentage change, so a dip means the industry was down on where it was at the same point the year before.

CHART OF THE DAY: Video Game Industry Not So Recession Proof After All [TBI, via 1UP]

Here’s what Tom Tippl told the gathering:

It’s definitely an aspiration that we see potential in, particularly as we look at different business models to monetize the online gameplay. There’s good knowledge exchange happening between the Blizzard folks and our online guys.

We have great experience also on Call of Duty with the success we had on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. A lot of that knowledge is getting actually built into the Battle.Net platform and the design of that. I think it’s been mutually beneficial, and you should expect us to test and ultimately launch additional online monetization models of some of some of our biggest franchises like Call of Duty.

And now that you’re red-faced and rushing to the comments to say no way in hell would you ever pay for this, Tippl reminds:

Our gamers are telling us there’s lots of services and innovation they would like to see that they’re not getting yet. From what we see so far, additional content, as well as all the services Blizzard is offering, is that there is demand from the core gamers to pay up for that.

So, got that? He says practically demanding to pay up. So pay up!

Activision Hints at Call of Duty Online Plans IGN via VG247 and just about every one else.]

Flush with the success of the launch, Kotick this week offloaded almost two million Activision stock options he’d held since 2000. When they were worth $US1.03 each. In this post-Modern Warfare 2 world, however, they’re worth around $US11.50.

Want me to do the math for you? Subtract the $US2 million strike price from the equation and Kotick earned himself just over $US20 million. In less than a week.

Think he’s an asshole? He can’t hear you. His mansions are insulated with money.

Activision CEO reaps $US20.2 million in three-day stock sale [GameSpot]

“We will be hiring back positions in low-cost locations to maintain capacity,” Brown said at the BMO Capital Markets Digital Entertainment Conference. Dow Jones Newswires had the quote first.

Brown didn’t say how many jobs would be hired back, nor when or where they would take place. I’m also not even sure what “to maintain capacity” means. But I don’t think we’re talking about the really good gigs here.

Electronic Arts To Hire Back Workers In Low-Cost Locations [WSJ.com via Go Nintendo]

This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision bean-counters reporting the game managed to pull in $US310 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that’s not a worldwide number, that’s just in North America and the UK. $US310 million. In a single day.

Sure, games cost more than a movie ticket, but $US310 million in 24 hours is still a mighty impressive number, regardless of the admission price.

That $US310 million was earned off the back of an estimated 4.7 million units sold, another frightening number when you consider it’s again excluding PAL sales.

Established at the end of October in Tokyo, the name of the company is “Cyber Ai Entertainment” with “ai” being Japanese for “love” and a pun on the word “eye”. The Japanese source article does not have the official English spelling; however, the official spelling is on the LinkedIn page of Sony exec and Cyber Ai board member Takashi Usuki.

The new venture aims to commercialise the development of next-generation internet services.

Kutaragi has a 90 per cent stake in the enterprise, while Usuki has the remaining 10 per cent. The upstart has 20 million yen ($239,000) in capital.

企業ニュース−企業の事業戦略、合併や提携から決算や人事まで速報 [NIKKEI NET（日経ネット）]

Sources tell Kotaku that the team working on Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was warned of its fate today, with almost the entire team expected to be let go after the real-time strategy game ships some time in 2010.

Also said to be affected heavily are Spore and The Sims studio EA Maxis, social network gaming Rupture Studios and Pandemic LA. Those development studios are said to be hit with substantial layoffs, according to a source, with remaining employees relocated to EA headquarters in Los Angeles and Redwood Shores.

EA is rumored to have already laid off staff at Tiburon, Mythic Entertainment and Black Box, reports which the company has yet to confirm.

We’ve reached out to Electronic Arts to verify these latest details, but have not yet heard back.