Nintendo officially announced Satellaview on December 21, 1994, set to be released at a retail price of ¥14,000, or US$150. Several third-party developers, such as Capcom, Taito, Konami, Seta and Squaresoft, announced plans to produce games for the peripheral following its unveiling. The peripheral itself was designed by Nintendo Research & Development 2, the same team that designed the Super Famicom. Despite the company being in a slump due to falling Super Famicom game sales and the Virtual Boy's failure, Nintendo remained confident that Satellaview would be successful and would help calm any supposed "fears" by consumers that the company was on the way out; company president Hiroshi Yamauchi expected to sell roughly 2 million Satellaviews each year. Pre-orders were made available beginning February 25, 1995. Broadcasting services for Satellaview launched on April 1, though the peripheral itself was not released until April 24. It was only sold via mail order, instead of being released into stores. Satellaview was never released in North America, which some publications cited as being due to expensive costs of satellite broadcasting, and due to a supposed lack of appeal to American consumers. When the service first launched, St.GIGA had a number of issues regarding broadcasting video games and video game-related services through the Satellaview service, such as legal issues with other companies and technical restraints of the time. In June 1996, Nintendo announced that they would partner with Microsoft to release a service similar to Satellaview for Windows operating systems, which would combine St.GIGA's broadcasting services with dial-up Internet; this was never launched. By March 1997, St.GIGA reported that Satellaview had 116,378 active players.