At Nintendo's 72nd Annual General Meeting, the company's president, Satoru Iwata, confessed that the 3DS's "momentum in the US and Europe is currently weak."
The sales of the 3DS in the West juxtapose a much more positive situation in Japan, where the handheld is selling better than expected: "Sales of the Nintendo 3DS are constant in Japan and in fact we could say the sales volume is exceeding our forecast at the start of this fiscal year," Iwata told investors.
He then added: "Considering that the US and European markets are larger than the Japanese market in terms of the size of the population, sales in the US and Europe are supposed to be larger. As a result, the sales proportion of the Nintendo 3DS is now about 20 per cent of the total video game sales in those markets. Thus, solid sales momentum has not been created."
To put that in perspective, in Japan the 3DS accounts for 55 per cent of all hardware sales. Nintendo will be hoping that titles such as New Super Mario Bros. 2 and the new 3DS XL will rejuvenate sales in Europe and the US.