It's been more than a decade since Japanese game maker Nintendo Co. lost its dominance of the home videogame market to rival Sony and its PlayStation machines. So it wouldn't be surprising if Nintendo hoped for a measure of payback with its new home gaming console, the Wii.

But for Nintendo, profit is the best revenge. That's why the Wii, which goes on sale today, is radically different from Sony's new PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 machines. "By design and by strategy, it's targeted differently," said George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing at Nintendo of America Inc. in Redmond, Wash.

With a relatively low-powered computer chip, an innovative motion-based controller, and a comparatively slender $250 price tag, the Wii (pronounced "we") is designed to attract millions of buyers put off by the high cost and complexity of Xbox and PS3. The Wii is also cheap to assemble. The Xbox ($300-$400) and PS3 ($500-$600) sell for hundreds less than it costs to build them, forcing Sony and Microsoft to swallow hundreds of millions in losses that they must make up on sales of games. In contrast, Harrison said, the Wii's sale price is only a little higher than its manufacturing cost, and that by next year, Nintendo will make a profit on every unit sold. Sony and Microsoft are huge companies that can rely on other profit centers to soak up the red ink. Not so at Nintendo, said Harrison. "We're only a video game company, so we don't have anywhere to hide our losses."

In the fight for gaming supremacy, however, it looks like Nintendo brought a knife to a gunfight. Because of its lower computing power, the Wii can't match the lavish 3-D graphics so popular with fans of first-person shooting games. Nintendo's machine doesn't even support high-resolution graphics as its rivals do.

The Wii's chief technical advance is a unique wireless two-piece game controller. With help from a motion-sensing chip developed at Norwood's Analog Devices Inc., the Wii controller lets users play games by moving their hands and arms.

It might seem like a slender advantage, but Harrison sees the new controller as a key to the Wii's success. Many people have a casual interest in playing games but are put off by the usual buttons and joysticks. Nintendo is betting that a simpler, more intuitive control system will win over these nongamers. "We really want to expand the audience for the video game industry," Harrison said.

It's a plan that worked for Nintendo in the handheld-gaming market. Many industry watchers were skeptical about the company's DS system, which features two video screens, including one that responds to touch. But the DS has been massively successful, especially with senior citizens in Japan — a group that had never embraced video games. The DS has far outsold Sony's rival PSP, despite the PSP's better graphics and fancier features.