Amid a huge fall in profits, the Japanese games giant Nintendo has announced it will launch a successor to its pioneering Wii console later this year.
The WiiU will be launched in the US, Europe (Chicago Options: ^REURUSD - news) , Australia and Japan (EUREX: FMJP.EX - news) in time for the year-end shopping season.
But the announcement came as the company posted a 61% drop in quarterly operating profits, and trebled its forecasted losses for this year to £538m.
The falls were far worse than market expectations, with Nintendo hit hard by weak sales and the strong yen.
The full-year operating loss will be the first since the company started announcing earnings in their current form in 1981.
The creator of the Super Mario franchise dominated the video games industry for years with its DS handheld players and Wii home consoles, but is now struggling to keep up with more versatile gadgets like Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) 's smartphones and tablets.
On Tuesday, Apple announced its stongest trading quarter in the company's 35-year history.
By contrast, in August poor sales forced Nintendo to slash the price of its much-anticipated 3DS handheld games device, only six months after its launch.
The firm has also downgraded its annual sales forecast to £5.4bn for the year to March, from an earlier forecast for £6.5bn.
It cut estimates for its ageing Wii console to 10 million devices from 12 million, and for the 3DS handheld games device to 14 million from 16 million.
The Wii revolutionised the market with its motion-sensing control system when it arrived back in 2006.
Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata said: "We had higher expectations for the year-end season, but failed to meet them."
The firm's business model, which saw it making profits on games hardware as well as software, took operating income to a high of £4.5bn in 2008/09.
Dr Seijiro Takeshita, director of the Japanese investment bank Mizuho International, said that while the exchange rate was a problem for Nintendo, the company has "other problems as well".
"Their next ignition point - new hardware - is not in the oven," he told Sky News.
He added that, in future, the firm would probably concentrate more on software because of the intense competition from other hardware devices.
It was therefore "worrying" that software sales were weak as this was where "their future lies", Dr Takeshita said.
In more bad news for a country that prides itself on electronics exports, Japan revealed on Wednesday its first annual trade deficit for more than 30 years.
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