Thursday 27th October 2011 by Alex Winehouse

Nintendo has posted worringly large losses from its second financial quarter.

The gaming giant saw an operating loss of 19.6 billion yen ($258m / £161m) from July to September, Reuters reports.

During the same period in 2010, the company made a profit of 30.9 billion yen ($407m / £254m).

Whilst losses were expected, the results are still worse than imagined, and has meant that the expected profit forecast for the 2011-2012 financial year has shrunk from 35 billion yen to 1 billion yen.

While part of the reason is attributed to poor sales of the new 3DS console, hardware predictions remain the same at 16 million units for the financial year.

A price cut to their new model resulted in a 12% drop in Nintendo's stock earlier this year.

The company will be hoping that the release of the Wii U console in 2012 will arrest the slide.

Forty years of games consoles...