Iwata: Wii has stalled, “sales returned to a certain level” after price drop

Update: Looks like the initial statement was mistranslated. Iwata did not say that Nintendo has failed with the Wii and we’ve added in the fully corrected statement in this post.

Over the last few months, the sales of the Wii in Japan (not to mention the U.S.) have been dropping. And today, Nintendo said that there was a 59% drop in first-half profit. During a press conference, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted that the company failed with the Wii, but did say that the current price drop has stabilized sales somewhat.

“Wii has stalled. 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. 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. In order to reach it (20 million target), 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].”

Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4