Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is trying to save face after a poor showing for the 3DS has put the company’s long-standing portable gaming crown at jeopardy.
Iwata recently addressed investors and spoke about the issue of Nintendo’s surprisingly sparing amount of first-party titles on the glasses-free 3D platform.
He said for some of the hottest games, “There will be a short interval between when they are completed and when they are launched,” according to a quotation from CVG.
“For example, when we look at the software lineup for the year-end sales season, it is so dense that, if we added any more software, the total sales would not increase. Accordingly, we have intentionally delayed the launch of some software titles to early next year,” he continued.
However, Iwata was reasonable and did not try to say this strategy was responsible for the company’s utter lack of good titles on the 3DS’s launch. The fact that there was not a single game featuring Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, or any of Nintendo’s heavyweight franchises is at least partially blamed for why the system did so poorly out of the gate.
“We failed to offer strong software titles without long intervals in the first half of this year,” Iwata admitted.
