One of the keynote speaker today at Dow Jones' Venturewire Consumer Tech conference today is no less than Nintendo America President, Reggie Fils-Aime himself. The other one is Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg!
During the Q&A session, Fils-Aime predicted that shortage of Wii hardware is going to continue through the holiday season and perhaps even beyond that! For the Nintendo exec it's a missed opportunity to reach the average gamer that would want a Wii but won't sit overnight to get one.

Gaming for the masses
In the video below Fils-Aime compared the consumer demographic of the Wii and the XBox 360. The Wii has a 70%/30% balance of male/female users (vs 90% for the Xbox) and slightly older age range than the "pimply face" 17 yrs old Xbox gamer. For Nintendo, the goal is to bring gaming back to the masses. He also mentioned the unsuccessful Golden Eye game that was much too complex for the casual gamer. Fils-Aime also talked up new opportunities around the Nintendo channels (Internet, weather forecast...) that may or may not look like games "but are a gateway to a gaming experience".


Can't make enough Wiis! Worst thing Nintendo can do.
Nintendo is currently building 1.8 million Wiis a month and on track to sell on a world wide basis more than 17.5 million units for the full year of the console, versus 14.5 millions initially planned, something "no first year system has ever done". And still, it's not enough as the demand still exceeds all that. "The more we put in, the more we sell". And according to Fils-Aime, it's the worst thing Nintendo can do, in its reach to casual gamers. He discarded both the conspiration theory that Nintendo is responsible for the lack of hardware and the "fallacy" that the Wii is only for older casual gamers and not for core gamers citing games like Metroid or Legend of Zelda. Same thing for Microsoft's assumption that Nintendo is not "developer" friendly citing 20 exclusive games for the Wii this quarter, more than all the Nintendo competitors combined, a large third-party ecosystem as well as an average of 3.4 games sold for each Wiis. Just like the like the PS2 was at this point in its life or the PS3 now.

53 million Nintendo DS served!
Simply the fastest selling console ever, period!

Lots of opportunities for gaming entrepreneurs
Nintendo America recently opened new offices in the Silicon Valley (65 people) and New York to be right in the middle of the entertainment, internet and gaming worlds. Nintendo is evaluating other ways to monetise its consoles through advertising, subscriptions, the internet channel service or simply paid content. Fils-Aime also pointed that Nintendo is now embracing the community of developers, large and small, by sharing tools, technology and knowledge to create their own games that then be sold directly to consumers through the Wii's internet channel with very low marketing cost.

"The idea, the concept is to find the next great Tetris... The cost estimate for a competitive platform game could be anywhere between $20 and $50 million, total investment. For a Nintendo DS game, we're talking in a hundreds of thousands of dollars and for a Wii game maybe $5 to $10 million... And that of course drives the difference in how many copies you have to sell as a publisher, to have it be a positive financial investment".