rising.
"We originally planned to release a few first-party titles for Wii U during the first half of this year, but no big titles are scheduled for release before Pikmin 3 in July [in Japan] because we decided to take time to add the final touches to ensure that consumers fully feel that they are valuable titles. The brand of a franchise would be completely degraded without customer satisfaction.
"The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them. In short, the development teams of Pikmin 3 and other future games were understaffed during that period."
Iwata also said that software development is becoming more challenging as consumers are being more selective about purchases.
"It is true that it is becoming increasingly challenging to meet the expectations of consumers who are willing to pay $50-$60 for a game, and it is difficult to break even unless a huge number of units is sold all over the world, so it cannot be denied that software development is becoming more challenging.
"Among such packaged software, however, the sales of popular games are much larger than in the past. Therefore, if we create more hit games, the software development business can still be very profitable. All games break even if they sell millions of copies worldwide, so we will continue to do our best to develop games which have high sales potential."
Well, apparently a lot of Nintendo projects were understaffed, which sucks,. Nintendo definition didn't transition as smoothly as we thought they would. The cost for HD gaming is pretty high, and you have to factor in all the other stuff as well. This is why Pikmin 3 has been delayed for such a longer period of time.