Satoru Iwata and chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach have claimed that people are becoming too obsessed with the next generation of hardware.

Satoru Iwata and Robbie Bach both share the view that developers and hardware companies must rethink their strategies to keep customers interested.

Iwata stated that the industry has reached a "turning point" and must change from what it has been like for the last twenty years. Both Iwata and Bach also believe that the future is in software, rather then hardware.

"We have reached a turning point," said Iwata. "In Japan, software and hardware sales across the whole industry are in decline and this looks set to continue." He continued to predict that "the US and Europe will be in a similar situation if all that we can offer is more complex and time-consuming games".

"We cannot continue to sell games software the way we did in the past. Nintendo has always been hoping to create unprecedented interactive entertainment, which is not solely dependent on the emergence of new technologies."

Bach added: "We believe that software - not silicon - will define the next generation. While hardware grows in leaps and bounds, software provides for continual innovation, independent of the next 'box'."