Iwata: 3DS Sales Still Weak in US and Europe - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 July 2012 / 6,450 Views
In a meeting with the shareholders, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata admitted that while sales of its 3DS handheld are good in Japan, sales are still weak in the US and Europe. The 3DS has accounted for half of all hardware sales in Japan.
"Considering that the U.S. and European markets are larger than the Japanese market in terms of the size of the population, sales in the U.S. and Europe are supposed to be larger," said Iwata. "At the year end of 2011 the sales momentum in those markets increased in the same way as in Japan; however, the sales pace went down after the beginning of 2012. As a result, the sales proportion of the Nintendo 3DS is now about 20% of the total video game sales in those markets."
"With the Nintendo 3DS XL I just spoke about and our key titles, such as New Super Mario Bros. 2, to be released globally this summer, one of our immediate top-priority missions is to create sales momentum," Iwata continued.
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It's encouraging that he recognises the problem
A true leader admits faults and finds way to correct them, while still maintaining quality
The difference is Japan saw the release of alot more titles than euroep and the US. Also nintendo, please push capcom to release monster hunter 3G here. That would've helped push sales. I dont know why capcom and nintendo were sleeping on the job with this one.
I hope this creates a momentum. We got Heroes of Ruin, KH3D, The Rhythm FF, NSMB2 over the next month! Hopefully this carries on till Christmas and we get the big guns then (LM2, Paper Mario, Animal crossing (Hopefully christmas), Brain Age 3, and some 3rd party titles
The Iwata thumbnail for this article says "True story".
The problem (for me and many others who still haven't bought one): 3DS is region-locked and there is still no workaround. If there was no region-locking, I would buy a 3DS XL directly after it is released.
Separated extra-large Circle Pad Pro is a bad idea and won't help it. There definitely was space available to include it in the XL, an XL version of an awkward peripheral is even more awkward.
Pokemon 3ds will remedy this.
I want to play Crysis on a 3DS!!!
Nintendo must vary its releases and get some 3rd parties on board. More mario is not going to change anything. And the XL is more expensive, which is not going to help either.
thay are not weak at all
just not unbeliebably good this time
More quality must own titles are needed. Then the sales will rally.
Interesting how the term 'weak' has somehow come to define strong 2nd place out of 7 current consoles.
Okay, to say this they must have a plan, oh well they already have, 3DS games in Summer!
The 3DS is the second highest selling system in the U.S. Makes me wonder what he would call selling well. They just don't care about the Wii anymore though.
Start releasing some games then!
well he's not shoving it away and it's a good thing, but thats not exactly what he said VG lol
Yeah.. I'm one of the people that bought three different DS models, but just haven't got much of a reason to get a 3DS. It just brings too little to the table, and particularly in US and Europe, there's just not enough games that do anything interesting.
