Nintendo: DS in need of a 'big hit title'

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has admitted that a decline in DS hardware sales in Europe show the platform is in urgent need of a "big hit" title.

The problem, he says, not just for DS but Wii too is a lack of big games this year. "Also similar to the U.S., 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," he admitted in a recent financial briefing.

"In the U.S., Xbox360 has been keeping the lead over PS3 this year. In Europe, on the other hand, while Xbox360 was showing the decline, PS3 has shown increase since the fall of 2009. It appears that the benefit of third party publishers' big multiplatform titles has been mainly contributing to PS3," elaborates Iwata.

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

"So, we recognize 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," concluded the Nintendo boss.

Pokemon Black/White was revealed last month. That should do it.

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