Tokyo - Nintendo Co, the world's top maker of videogame consoles, on Thursday dropped its profit and sales forecasts for this fiscal year on falling sales of its Wii player.

It said it expected its net income in the year ending March 31 to fall to 230 billion yen (2.5 billion dollars), which would represent a 17.6-per-cent drop from the past financial year and the first decline in profit in six years.

The Kyoto-based firm said its annual sales were expected to fall 18.4 per cent to 1.5 trillion yen.

The game console industry, which not so long back was considered to have withstood the blows of recession, now appears to be in dire straits - what with the industry leader Nintendo Co. finding it an uphill task to entice new customers, and thus dealing with plunging profits!

In its recent report posted Thursday, Nintendo - the Kyoto, Japan-based maker of the popular console Wii - has reported that its profit for the quarter ended June 30 tumbled as much as 60 percent to $442.8 million, vis-à-vis the same quarter year-before profit of $1.1 billion.