After a dismal first half of the year, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has high hopes for the rest of the year, and downplayed any talk of a Nintendo Wii price cut in the near future.
The Japanese territory will have a black version of the Nintendo Wii soon that Iwata hopes will lift sales, and looks at three key titles to bring in some significant bank by the end of the year.
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[Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros. Wii] are Nintendo’s main titles for the year, Iwata said. Nintendo believes they easily have the potential to sell 10 million units each worldwide by the end of the fiscal year (March 2010). Iwata said that, due to the lining up of the three releases, “We’d like to work so that people say ‘This was the best Christmas in Nintendo history.'”
Of particular note is how, despite all the press and praise heaped on Nintendo for the past couple of years, Iwata was very critical of the success of their key games last year.
Killer releases may not necessarily mean just games released over the quarter. It appears that Nintendo has come to expect some of its games to have long legs, and Iwata once again expressed disappointment with one title and its lack of extended sales: Wii Music. He also seems disappointed with sales of Animal Crossing City Folk.
“Last year, Wii Music and Animal Crossing City Folk did not reach our expectations,” said Iwata. “If we had made them into long sellers, the effects of the lack of software in the first half of the year would have been lowered. However, their sales slowed in a relatively short term.”
