Speaking in an investors' Q&A session recently, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was asked about Wii Music, which has gotten mixed reactions from critics (and a 63 average on GameRankings). The game has sold over 400K units in Japan and 865K in the U.S. One investor said he simply "didn't feel the fun" with Wii Music like he did with Wii Sports or Wii Fit.

Iwata acknowledged, "I agree that Wii Music, as of now, has not achieved its true potential. On the other hand, I feel that Wii Music is a software that elicits largely two extremely different reaction from consumers. There are people who highly appreciate it and those who do not appreciate it at all. Usually for other software, if there is a fair amount of people who evaluate the software positively, the appreciation level of that software becomes slightly skewed toward a positive note, but on the other hand, if a number of people evaluate it poorly, the overall reaction to the software is bad. For Wii Music, the impression seems to completely depend on each individual player. It is unfortunate that Wii Music was not immediately appealing enough to some consumers, but it simply might have not been the right game for them."

Having said that, Iwata isn't ready to give up on Wii Music. He thinks it just might take a little more time for the sales pace to really pick up.

"I would like you to recall the case of Brain Training software. Nintendo launched the first Brain Training software in May in Japan, and it was only around the time Nintendo launched More Brain Training at the end of the year, when the original Brain Training started to show explosive sales," he noted.

"Currently, I think that the appeal of Wii Music has not yet been fully conveyed and accepted by those who could be interested. We do not like to think that we failed with Wii Music nor that we should abandon sales support. If we had approached Brain Training with that mentality, the software would have not achieved the current sales situation. The first week unit sales of the original Brain Training in Japan was just around 45,000. We should not have the attitude that a game does not have sales potential because the first week or first month sales were small."