Nintendo is poised to withdraw planned television advertising for the Wii because of the severe shortages of the games console in the run-up to Christmas.

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 added that the company is “looking at moving some advertising on some products into early 2008” because it wants to “act responsibly”.

Nintendo has hiked production targets several times in recent months and now plans to ship 17.5 million Wiis globally this year, up from an original 14 million.

Dismissing suggestions that it has engineered shortages to build hype around the console, Nintendo says its supply chain is working at full capacity, producing 1.8 million units 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 current severe shortages could prove "a very serious missed opportunity".

Piers Harding-Rolls, the Screen Digest analyst, 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's then that we'll discover whether it's 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 “non-core gamers” - women and older people hitherto ignored by the games industry - and Nintendo’s decision to undercut its competitors on price. Slashing costs to the bone has had an impact, however, and industry watchers believe the Wii's lifespan will be much shorter than its rivals'.

According to Screen Digest, the Wii will achieve game software sales, traditionally the source of the lion's share of profits for the gaming industry, of more than $10 billion (£4.9 billion) in the next two years.

Those software revenues are expected to peak in 2009. In the same year, the value of games sold for Sony's rival 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.

Nintendo had sought to diversify before -- in 1963, for instance, it made an abortive foray into the taxi and "love hotel" business. But the creation of the Wii, a dramatic break with the industry’s accepted wisdom, has been heralded as the 118-year-old company's masterstroke.

There are suspicions, however, that in other regards Nintendo has been too conservative.

The dearth of Wii supplies has been linked to a misfiring "just in time" production line, a desire to maximise cashflows by clampling down on inventories and Nintendo's failure to shake of an institutionalised sense of caution.

Christmas shoppers searching for Wiis may not appreciate the fact, but financially, the company has under-promised and over-delivered. In the past two years, Nintendo has achieved its full year financial targets in just nine months.

It may fade into obscurity quicker than the PlayStation 3, but this summer Saturo Iwata, the Nintendo president, confirmed to The Times that the Wii has been profitable virtually from the outset.

By contrast, the PS3 is thought to have made a loss of as much as $200 a console in its early months. Since then, ominously, Sony has been forced to slash prices.

Times Recommends

• Brown targets fat cats after nationalising banks
• US shares soar on global banking rescue
• Europe follows Brown to head off meltdown