Nintendo delaying first-party Wii U releases

Nintendo is delaying the launch of first-party Wii U games so that the console can continue to sell well through 2013.

This is according to Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata, who claimed the company expects the Wii U to do well at launch but maintaining interest might be difficult.

"If you look at how pre-orders are doing at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wii U is sure to sell well in this holiday season," Iwata told investors.

"But we realise the biggest challenge is to make sure that Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season, and we are working on that too."

Iwata said Nintendo has released too many games during hardware launches in the past and this leads to a decrease in sales over time.

"Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen."

The plan this time is for third-party publishers to develop more launch titles and Nintendo to release its own games in 2013.

"Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year.

"We will continue to supply software to provide new content that consumers will talk about even after January. The combination of these two things is what we think will keep our momentum going after January next year."