Nintendo president voices his desire to see another 'big hit' DS title to invigorate sales of the system...

Even though the Nintendo DS has now officially overtaken sales of the Game Boy to become the most popular handheld console in history, demand for the device is still high over five years on from launch. But not every man sees reason to cheer for the current performance of the DS.

Company president Satoru Iwata recently addressed shareholders at Nintendo's financial report presentation, and noted that a settling down of sales for the DS, especially in Europe, could mean that it's time for another big software push.

"In the US, Xbox 360 has been keeping the lead over PS3 this year. In Europe, on the other hand, while Xbox 360 was showing the decline, PS3 has shown increase since the fall of 2009. It appears that the benefit of third party publishers' big multiplatform titles has been mainly contributing to PS3. On the other hand, the sales of Nintendo DS hardware in Europe are showing a year-on-year decrease, unlike the United States market. While Wii has been embracing big hit titles since the latter half of 2009, not many strong titles to significantly drive hardware sales have been launched for Nintendo DS for a while. So, we recognise that we are coming to the stage where we need to offer a hit title that can gain social phenomena and catch our customers' attentions."

With 3DS set to hit the market within the next twelve months, one probably shouldn't take from this a sign that Nintendo's in-house software divisions are beavering away at a new range of DS software. Having said that, if fans want to look for that, there is Pokémon Black & White that hits Japan in 2010 - a guaranteed success if ever there was one.

It is more than likely Iwata's plans for the future of the DS revolve more around backing high-profile third party titles in the global market. This can already be seen with Nintendo publishing Dragon Quest IX in the west later this year, and we wouldn't rule out a similar strategy for other Japanese games such as Level-5 and Studio Ghibli's Ninokuni: The Another World. This strategy certainly seemed to pay of recently with Capcom's Monster Hunter Tri, which instantly gave the franchise a secure footing in the western markets after years of obscurity.

Either way, we wouldn't be at all surprised if the DS was still essentially selling like hotcakes this time next year.