Iwata: Wii has stalled, unable to continually release strong software

Nintendo's Satoru Iwata has said that despite the company's drop in profits for the six month period ending September 30 he is positive that the price drop for Wii will help once it moves more units.

"Wii has stalled," said Iwata during a press conference. "We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool. We were unable to show a new game to become 'the next thing.' In the game market, once you've lost the momentum, it takes time to recover.

"With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time. We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year.

"In order to reach it [20 million units], we'll have to move quite a large quantity, but it's a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning [based off the price drop]."

Nintendo's operating income fell 58.6 percent from the same period last year, with Wii sales falling 43 percent from last year to 5.75 million units, thus causing Nintendo to lower its Wii sales forecasts for the year from 26 million to 20 million units.

More through Andriasang.