Nintendo is poised to halt television advertising for its Wii because of a severe shortage of the games console.

A spokesman for the Japanese group said that demand for the Wii, which made its global debut a year ago today, “has been unprecedented and higher than Nintendo could ever have anticipated”. He said that the company was “looking at moving some advertising on some products into early 2008” because it wants to “act responsibly”.

Nintendo has raised production targets several times in recent months and now plans to ship 17.5 million units globally this year, up from 14 million. Dismissing suggestions that it has engineered shortages, Nintendo says that it is working at full capacity to produce 1.8 million a month.

According to analysts, next year will decide whether Nintendo’s tactic of building a video games machine “for people who don’t like video games” has provided, in the Wii, a vehicle for a long-term strategy. If it does not, Nintendo executives privately admit, the present severe shortages could prove to be “a very serious missed opportunity”.

Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst for the market researcher Screen Digest, said: “The issue of supply management has to be questioned, not least because 2008 is going to be the crunch year for the Wii. It is then that we will discover whether it is a fad or something with legs.” The Wii has outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 each by more than two-to-one this year. Its success is built on its appeal to “noncore gamers” – women and older people hitherto ignored by the games industry.

According to Screen Digest, the Wii will achieve game software sales of more than $10 billion (£4.9 billion) in the next two years. Those revenues are expected to peak in 2009 - and in the same year the value of games sold for PlayStation 3, at more than $6 billion, are forecast to overtake those for the Wii for the first time.

As little as a year later, analysts say, Nintendo must have a replacement console ready. Sony, meanwhile, is not expected to unveil a successor to the PS3 until 2013.

Christmas shoppers searching for Wiis may not appreciate the fact, but financially the 118-year-old company has underpromised and overdelivered. In the past two years, Nintendo has achieved its full year financial targets in only nine months.

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