Making money off of hardware alone from day one

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime previously explained that his company's approach to hardware design for the freshly-launched Wii revolves around low-cost at manufacturing. This in turn should lead to early profitability thanks to the decreased cost to the company for each Wii console sold, and Nintendo of Canada's marketing director Pierre-Paul Trépanier confirms this is the case now that the console has launched in North America.

"We make a profit on the system itself," Trépanier said. "Unlike our competitors, we don’t have ulterior motives; we’re not in it to sell HD TVs, or to become the operating system in the living room or anything like that... We’re in the gaming business, and we have to make money from everything we sell - and we are making money from day one on the Wii."

While Trépanier echoes his company's commitment to meet demand for the rest of this year, he still cautions that supply issues will be a possiblity during the console's "first few weeks".