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Iwata: Wii sales have stalled

President blames poor performance on lack of strong software releases; price drop hasn't had desired effect

Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata has admitted that sales of the Wii console have stalled, in part due to a lack of must-have software.

The company released data yesterday that showed sales of the home console were down over 40 per cent in the six months to the end of September 2009, with 5.75 million Wii's sold worldwide, compared to 10 million the previous year.

"Wii has stalled," Iwata told a press conference, reports Andriasang. "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," he offered.

"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 said. "We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year.

However, Iwata was upbeat about forecasts for the full-year, with expectations the company can sell 20 million consoles by the end of March 2010.

"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."

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Matt Martin

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Matt Martin joined GamesIndustry in 2006 and was made editor of the site in 2008. With over ten years experience in journalism, he has written for multiple trade, consumer, contract and business-to-business publications in the games, retail and technology sectors.

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