Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has admitted that a decline in DS hardware sales in Europe shows the platform is in urgent need of a "big hit" title.

He says the problem, not just for DS but Wii as well, is a lack of big games this year. "Also similar to the US, 2010 has not seen a strong software lineup thus far for the Wii platform, while big titles were launched for other companies' platforms one after another," he admitted in a recent financial briefing.

"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," elaborates Iwata.

"On the other hand, the sales of Nintendo DS hardware in Europe are showing a year-on-year decrease, unlike the United States market," he added, saying: "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," concluded the Nintendo boss.

[ Source: Nintendo ] http://www.edge-online.com/news/ds-needs-big-hit-title-says-nintendo

Maybe we'll finally see a sequel to Nintendogs or the next 2D Mario game either one of those would do it.

super smash brothers ds....do it nintendo!!!

come on Nintendo, Ds sold 130m

it's normal for sales to decline, so i believe a Ds hit title won't do much, as HeartGold and SoulSilver did not increased hardware sales, Black and White won't increase hardware sales either and no game will do so (at least not by much)

i think Nintendo has to fucus on 3DS and how that hardware will draw attention and not about the slowly decreasing sales of the Ds which are already huge

I hate how these articles keep popping up days after the Q&A was done as if it was new information.. Go read the financial report on the Japanese Nintendo website if you want to know what Nintendo thinks and what they're up to.

The worst is that they post a a piece every day, instead post everything at once... also this gives the impression that Iwata gives lots of interviews ...(maybe this is the idea , keep talking about Nintendo in may , cuz they dont say a thing with E3 just ahead.)

Time to localize Tomodachi Collection...

Cough DQ9 Cough Hm I wonder why they will put out?

Yes please ^^

Now that you mention ...will Tomodachi Collection 3D one of the first games for the 3DS ?

they already have one coming.....GOLDEN SUN DS!!!