BLOG

MEDIA

DBASE

Iwata Says Wii Price Drop Effective

Nintendo CEO admits to Wii slowdown, but signals a rebound.

Posted Oct 29, 2009 at 23:03, By Anoop Gantayat

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata.

Nintendo's earnings report today showed the first drop in profits the company has seen in four years. For the six month period ending September 30, the Kyoto giant's operating income fell 58.6% from the same period last year to 104.3 billion yen. The Wii platform took a major hit, its sales falling 43% from last year to 5.75 million units. Nintendo ended up lowering its Wii sales forecasts for the full year from 26 million units to 20 million units.

Mainichi Shimbun reports that Iwata, speaking at a press conference in Osaka today, said "Wii has stalled. We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool."

[NOTE: I originally mistranslated Iwata's statement as "We failed with the Wii." The above is now the corrected form. ]

Sankei Shimbun, covering the same press conference, reported Iwata as having said "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."

It does seem that Iwata has a positive outlook for the Wii, though, thanks to the September price drop. According to a Reuters report from the press conference, Iwata said of the decision to lower Wii's sales targets, "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." On the new 20 million target, he said, "In order to reach it, 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]."

READ AND POST COMMENTS BELOW

Reader Comments (showing 4 of 4)

  • It always boggles my mind to see constantly large sales numbers for any product. If whatever the item is happens to be so popular everyone has to have it, therefore goes out and gets it, who keeps buying these things? Are they cloning new customers in vats or something? How hasn't the Wii (for example) reached critical mass yet?

  • It is a good thing that you properly translated what Satoru Iwata said as many people will wonder why he said "We failed with the Wii." Even though its sales have stalled, it is beyond a commerical failure. It is a success even with the recent slowdown. I do not think that anyone can expect that the Wii will continue its upward trend for long, as "what goes up must go down."

    Will the Wii sales slump, it would be time for Nintendo to do something to the Wii that it has done already with the DS -- revise it and release alternative colors to revive sales. And also to release some eye-catching software for 2010.

  • Wii HD! DO IT!

  • Unless the Wii HD advances beyond simply more hardware power, I think it would be a complete waste of time and effort. The third-parties would still have to contend with the control scheme making multiplatform development difficult, and the online system would be a hassle for them compared to XBL and PSN.

    Nintendo is much better off building a true successor to the Wii that fixes its mistakes while taking cues from its competitors.

ADVERTISEMENT

 

© 2010 andriasang.com