In the firm's financial results briefing for the year ended March 31, president Satoru Iwata told investors that Nintendo thought it more valuable to delay games than rush them to market and risk damaging key brands. "We originally planned to release a few first-party titles for Wii U during the first half of this year, but no big titles are scheduled for release before
Pikmin 3 in July [in Japan] because we decided to take time to add the final touches to ensure that consumers fully feel that they are valuable titles. The brand of a franchise would be completely degraded without customer satisfaction.
"The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them. In short, the development teams of Pikmin 3 and other future games were understaffed during that period."
Iwata also said that software development is becoming more challenging as consumers are being more selective about purchases.
"It is true that it is becoming increasingly challenging to meet the expectations of consumers who are willing to pay $50-$60 for a game, and it is difficult to break even unless a huge number of units is sold all over the world, so it cannot be denied that software development is becoming more challenging.
"Among such packaged software, however, the sales of popular games are much larger than in the past. Therefore, if we create more hit games, the software development business can still be very profitable. All games break even if they sell millions of copies worldwide, so we will continue to do our best to develop games which have high sales potential."
Wii U software sales stood at 13.42 million units at the end of March, short of the 16 million Nintendo forecast in January, and Iwata said last week that the absence of strong first party games has negatively impacted hardware sales.
Wii U sales totalled 3.45 million at the end of Nintendo's financial year, with only 450,000 units sold in the first three months of 2013.
Iwata also cited Nintendo's inability "to solidly communicate the product value of Wii U" as a reason for weaker than expected hardware sales. "Some have the misunderstanding that Wii U is just Wii with a pad for games, and others even consider Wii U GamePad as a peripheral device connectable to Wii,"
he said. "We feel deeply responsible for not having tried hard enough to have consumers understand the product."
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