Nintendo recently showed its commitment to bring casual gaming to the masses by announcing the company’s intention to have more than 35 million Wii owners worldwide by 2012.

In an interview with Bloomberg, George Harrison, marketing chief at Nintendo of America Inc., said that the gaming giant- now with a market value of more than $43 billion- hopes to see more than 35 million Wii consoles in homes worldwide.

At the end of 2006, Nintendo increased monthly Wii production to more than 1 million units, but according to Harrison even that is not enough since Chinese plants are now urged to work even harder to meet demand. At such a pace, by the end of this year, over 18 million consoles would be produced. To give scale to such a figure, the Nintendo Gamecube sold 22 million units over the course of six years.

Since its inception on the US market, Wii has found more than 2.5 million buyers in 7 months, making it the fastest selling gaming console ever.

“Demand is much greater than we anticipated,” Harrison said. “A year ago no one thought we would be in this position.”

Wii’s success boosted Nintendo’s profits to record levels in the previous fiscal year, which ended on March 31.

Nintendo Co., Ltd., reported in April final consolidated fiscal year revenues of 966.5 billion yen and operating profits of 226.0 billion yen, an increase of 90 percent and 150 percent, respectively, over the same period one year ago. Both numbers are record highs for the company.

Nintendo has no plans to upgrade Wii concerning graphics, since the company’s focus is now to provide casual and hardcore gamers alike with entertaining games, which are not necessarily achieved through more powerful chips.

“We're starting to see in the performance of the PS3 and Xbox 360 that that's not necessarily motivating the market the way it used to,” he said. “So we're going to start work on future technology only when we believe it's necessary.”