For the past three years, Nintendo has been an unstoppable juggernaut of financial resolve in the face of falling revenues across their sector—but now it looks like their multi-year streak has come to an end. Even as of last year, the videogame giant saw their profits slipping, and this year they’ve slashed their fiscal year outlook in half. However, there is a light on the horizon, and that light is their much touted successor to the Nintendo DS: the 3DS.

The release of the new handheld gaming device may not turn Nintendo’s current financial woes around, but they are hoping it will keep them from slipping further.

At a briefing for analysts, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said the company had wanted the 3DS to be ready by year-end, but later decided it wouldn’t be able to supply enough units if it launched this year.

A successful start for the new device is critical for Nintendo, whose once-unstoppable success has started to peter out from slowing demand for its home and portable game machines. Nintendo said it aims to sell 4 million 3DS units and 15 million software units for the device this fiscal year to March 31, 2011.

It plans to sell the 3DS for about Y25,000 in Japan. Prices and launch dates for overseas markets will be announced later.

Y25,000 would be about $300 US.

The 3DS will be similar to the DS in that it has two display screens, but one of them will be a 3-D display. It will enable games to take advantage of an illusory 3-D effect that has yet to be fully described—but never fear, 2-D games and the like will be available for the platform. (I know I’m looking forward to the next Zelda for DS, 2-D or 3-D.)

This announcement suggests that Nintendo plans the release post-holiday season—the biggest boom of sales and announcements for the entire videogame industry—which will leave the gaming company wide open to barrages of products from its rival competitors, such as Microsoft and Sony. The Xbox 360 recently had announced that it would be receiving a motion-sensor accessory called the Kinect—to be released in November—and the PlayStation has already received the Move controller being sold earlier this month.

Not much news yet on any other handheld gaming devices to compete with the 3DS. The original, now classic, DS happened to be one of the strongest and best selling handhelds in its market for a long time and we’ve seen several evolutions and variations since its initial release. According to statistics over 132 million units have been sold since 2004.

Nintendo is hoping for an equally warm reception of its newest design and the 3-D aspect especially to make it stand-out.