Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has very much to be happy about with regards to 2007.

The NPD group's reports for the year had tagged his company's Wii and DS consoles as the period's best sellers, with analysts predicting more optimistic times for the company's performance.

That said, Iwata was on the spotlight again for a recent interview, where he discussed, among other matters, his thoughts on last year, WiiWare, and the prospect of adding more hardcore titles to the Wii's otherwise casual lineup.

Iwata started by elaborating on what his two biggest highlights for '07 were: first was the establishment of the Wii as a major presence among its competitors, the second being the the huge sales they picked up during the end-year holiday sales. As Iwata elaborated:

The earlier half of the year saw some mixed opinions about Nintendo, about how the Wii would do, about whether it would continue to sell or not. But thanks to those who supported us, things got off on a good start.

Although we saw market expansion with our Nintendo DS in Europe from 2006 and the U.S. recorded historical sales in 2006, this was the first surge that we saw since the Japanese DS craze.

For me, the biggest reason for wanting to do WiiWare is to create an opportunity for new products to materialize by providing a forum where those products can be sold without having to compete in terms of size or name recognition, or be bound by inflexible prices or inventory risk.

I hope that WiiWare can act as a platform for that kind of an experience, but there are always people who suspect that WiiWare is all about cutting out the distributors. I try to explain that that's really not the case every opportunity I get.