With sales of Nintendo's little white box down, company president Satoru Iwata has spoken openly about the problems the console faces...

Those who keep up-to-date with the monotonous business-side of the industry may know that Nintendo's profits had seen a sharp fall in the first half of the fiscal year. While revenue is still undoubtedly higher than competitors, Wii in particular has suffered something of a lull in sales in recent months. A snap price-cut was initiated by Nintendo recently in an attempt to cure the issue, but Satoru Iwata believes the problem lies deeper.

"Wii has stalled. 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. With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time. 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 it (20 million target), we'll have to move quite a large quantity, but it's a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning [based off the price drop]."

What's interesting is to see Iwata-san talk so transparantly about the issue, without resorting to PR spin to paint a prettier-than-reality picture. With a new black console releasing in Europe next month, and key games in form of Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros Wii set to capitalise on the holiday rush, it'll be interesting to see whether the console will enjoy a spike in the last months of 2009.

What do you think Nintendo's best option is of regaining Wii's momentum? Leave your comments below...