Satoru Iwata, the CEO of Japanese platform holder Nintendo, has admitted that the company’s failure to produce regular first party triple-A software for the console has lead to the recently announced dramatic drop in profits.

“Wii has stalled,” Iwata told Andriasang. “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.”

The exec added that whilst the global price Wii price cuts introduced last month have increased sales, Wii will likely fail to sell the 20m units Nintendo previously predicted.

“With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time,” he continued. “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 [our sales target], we'll have to move quite a large quantity, but it's a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning.”