Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, has also said he wants to move away from increasingly sophisticated and time consuming games, which dominate the games industry at the moment.

The games market shrunk dramatically last year, Mr Iwata said, because players were getting frustrated with the ever more sophisticated games. Some games can take months to finish and the result is players are buying fewer of them.

Nintendo now hopes to drive sales this year with new games, including a version of the 1980s favourite Donkey Kong, and has promised a product for next spring "that will deliver fresh surprises" and be fun even for novices.

Tough market

But moving away from complicated games seems like a risky strategy to some.

"Despite the fact that people are perhaps getting a bit tired of [the complicated games], if Nintendo were to go down that route of more immediate, simpler, shorter games.... it could alienate them further from the mass market," Joao Dinez Sanchez, editor of the industry magazine Edge, told BBC World Business Report.