Nintendo has released its earnings up to the end of the second quarter of the 2013 fiscal year, with the company posting another loss and adjusting its forecasts downwards again, but with an improved situation compared to recent times.

The company posted a net loss of 27.9 billion yen (about $350m/£218m) for the six months of April-September. However, it looks like the losses are somewhat abating, with the first quarter of the half accounting for roughly 17.2 billion yen ($220m/£135m) of the loss.

The figure was a significant improvement on the same half last year, which saw Nintendo swallow a 70 billion yen ($877m/£551m) loss.

The yen exchange rate is continuing to cause trouble for the company, accounting for 23.2 billion of lost income in the period.

Despite all this, Nintendo is still forecasting a net profit for the whole fiscal year, although it has cut this expected total down from 20 billion ($251m/£156m) yen to 6 billion yen ($75m/£47m).

As for hardware figures, 3DS is left to carry the company through to Christmas thanks to the essential collapse of Wii and DS. The aged systems barely sold a million units between them in the July-September quarter (0.61m and 0.44m, respectively). 3DS fared quite well, managing to sell 3.2 million systems worldwide in the three months, up significantly from the first three months of the year, and an increase of almost a million compared to same three months last year.

Perhaps most interestingly, Nintendo released their first official forecast for the yet-to-be-released Wii U. The company is expecting the console, which launches worldwide in time for Christmas, to sell a fairly modest 5.5 million units by the end of March 2013.