Opiate, I think you're right on that. Third parties' thinking isn't inexcusable - they don't have to take weak sales as proof that there's no point in spending more, just as a sign that there's a risk in spending more (which there is) - but it does seem to me that it's obvious from the data that third parties have a tremendous amount of room to expand on the Wii. I can understand individual third parties being leery of being the first to try making a big budget game in a given genre, but we can state pretty confidently that a big budget third party game in some genre would do pretty well.
My problem is mostly with the cognitive dissonance exhibited by those who attack the Wii for having relatively weak third party sales. I imagine that most third parties are at least aware of its potential for sales and are just uncertain of how best to take advantage of that. However, many posters on message boards seem to embrace the logic you outlined without any awareness that no amount of new data could convince them that the Wii could sell a big budget third party game. It's as if they think that the absurdly casual grandmothers buying all of the Wii games make sure to check the backs of boxes to make sure that something's published by Nintendo before purchasing it.
I also agree with you completely that the Wii has a big market for party games. Even here, though, I think that third parties are doing a pretty poor job. No one's come out with something better than Wii Sports in two years, and Carnival Games, while clearly one of the better options, has many obvious flaws.
Edit: I think it works to Nintendo's disadvantage here that their big titles are all slightly off-genre. Mario isn't a platformer like most platformers that third parties would put out, Zelda isn't quite an action-adventure game, and Metroid has a lot of odd conventions for a shooter. Nintendo put out Wii Sports, had massive success, and saw a lot of copycats. But they haven't demonstrated to third parties that other mainstream genres can be successful on the Wii. Shooters, broadly defined, have had reasonable success (Red Steel, Metroid, RE), but that's the one genre that the 360 and PS3 are easily better at supporting than the Wii.
My problem is mostly with the cognitive dissonance exhibited by those who attack the Wii for having relatively weak third party sales. I imagine that most third parties are at least aware of its potential for sales and are just uncertain of how best to take advantage of that. However, many posters on message boards seem to embrace the logic you outlined without any awareness that no amount of new data could convince them that the Wii could sell a big budget third party game. It's as if they think that the absurdly casual grandmothers buying all of the Wii games make sure to check the backs of boxes to make sure that something's published by Nintendo before purchasing it.
I also agree with you completely that the Wii has a big market for party games. Even here, though, I think that third parties are doing a pretty poor job. No one's come out with something better than Wii Sports in two years, and Carnival Games, while clearly one of the better options, has many obvious flaws.
Edit: I think it works to Nintendo's disadvantage here that their big titles are all slightly off-genre. Mario isn't a platformer like most platformers that third parties would put out, Zelda isn't quite an action-adventure game, and Metroid has a lot of odd conventions for a shooter. Nintendo put out Wii Sports, had massive success, and saw a lot of copycats. But they haven't demonstrated to third parties that other mainstream genres can be successful on the Wii. Shooters, broadly defined, have had reasonable success (Red Steel, Metroid, RE), but that's the one genre that the 360 and PS3 are easily better at supporting than the Wii.
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