Iwata: 'Wii sales are down'

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has announced that sales of the Wii console have fallen significantly over the past six months, Andriasang reports.

According to recent data, sales of the system suffered a 40% drop over the time period, with 5.75 million units sold worldwide in September 2009, compared to 10 million the previous year. Iwata attributed this to a lack of significant software releases.

"Wii has stalled," he told 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," he continued. "We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year."

However, the exec remained confident that the console can recover before the fiscal year is up, maintaining that Nintendo can sell 20 million consoles by the end of March next year.

"In order to reach it [the 20 million units target], we will have to move quite a large quantity, but it's a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning," he added.