DS needs "hit title" that gains social phenomena

Satoru Iwata has said that Nintendo is at the stage where it needs to offer a hit title for DS in order to increase sales and match the performance of the PlayStation 3.

And he noted that the problem had been experienced on Wii as well as DS, saying: "Also similar to the US, 2010 has not seen a strong software lineup thus far for the Wii platform, while big titles were launched for other companies' platforms one after another."

"In the US, Xbox 360 has been keeping the lead over PS3 this year. In Europe, on the other hand, while Xbox 360 was showing the decline, PS3 has shown increase since the fall of 2009," he said.

"It appears that the benefit of third party publishers' big multi-platform titles has been mainly contributing to PS3."

"On the other hand, the sales of Nintendo DS hardware in Europe are showing a year-on-year decrease, unlike the United States market.

"In Europe, Nintendo launched Nintendo DSi XL with the bigger screens in March this year, that had already launched in Japan as Nintendo DSi LL here, but the sales leap was comparatively smaller than that in April 2009, when we launched Nintendo DSi in Europe.

"While Wii has been embracing big hit titles since the latter half of 2009, not many strong titles to significantly drive hardware sales have been launched for Nintendo DS for a while.

"We recognise that we are coming to the stage where we need to offer a hit title that can gain social phenomena and catch our customers' attentions," he concluded.

Nintendo's year-end financials for fiscal 2010 showed drops in both DS hardware and software with worldwide DS hardware sales dipping from 31.18 million in 2009 to 27.11 million in 2010.