Bullshit. The wii userbase is simple - it wants good games or a good deal. Third parties may well be as deluded as you are, thinking that the audience just doesn't want the kind of games they are capable of making, but the truth is Wii owners have just been very discerning.
Wii Sports is some of the most fun you can have with the Wii console. 50m+ sold. Third party response? Cheap clones that even from a glance at the box, look like exactly that. The people who made Carnival Games and Deca Sports were lucky to do as well as they did.
Wii Play - cheap collection of minigames, thats only worth the price because it comes with a free remote - its basically the best way to get a second remote. 24m+ sold. Third party response? DERRRRP, I think they want minigame collections.
Wii Fit - a videogame that is marketed to capture people in the market for an impulsive self improvement fad or genuinely want to try and exercise and self-improve. Been done before on PS2 and countless other consoles, but never with a gimmick as clever as the balance board. 22m+ sold. Third party response? Cheap clones, but in some cases, clever takes on the idea -- such as EA Active and Ubisoft's Just Dance.
Mario Kart Wii - a fun online kart racing experience. 18m+ sold. Third party response? I can't even think of one. Car Vault? No Gamecube games sold this well btw. This is comparable to GTA San Andreas and GT3: A-Spec level success.
Super Mario Galaxy and New Super Mario Bros Wii - platforming games in both their freshest and old-school forms. Both 8m+ sold. Third party response? A port of Klonoa, and a Rabbids game where you push another Rabbid around in a trolley - which on the face of it could probably sound just as bad to people as FLUDD did last gen. And whats worse its came out after Ubisoft confusing the brand with several Rabbids minigame compilations. Thankfully, Capcom recognise the platform market potential with Megaman 9 and 10, and you could argue that A Boy and his Blob and a few other titles fit the bill as well.
I'm still not quite sure why third parties decided Wii would be suitable for an on-rails shooter revolution. Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles sold over a million, but did no one stop to consider that maybe the brand itself confused quite a few people into buying it after playing the sublime Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, and the RE games before it? Don't get me wrong, REUC was decent -- but I'm not sure very many Wii owners out there were clamoring for a sequel, or Dead Space Extraction, or House of the Dead or Ghost Squad etc. Was it just the IR functionality that prompted this, or was it a cheap way to spit out a game?
There are colossal gaps in the Wii's library that no-one has actually tried to fill. When I list games on other systems in the coming paragraph, don't misunderstand me as being someone who wants games in that franchise, or games of that graphical fidelity on the Wii. I'm not stupid. And I have a PS3, so I couldn't actually care less about getting them on the Wii. I am however perplexed that powerful publishing entities haven't stepped up to try and fill a need on the console, that those titles fill on the HD twins.
For starters - no one has tried to put a truly high caliber FPS or TPS out. Metroid Prime Corruption can hardly be called an FPS - but its the best one on the system. The next best thing on the system is Conduit - created by a developer that previously made bank by producing Barbie games. Meanwhile the HD twins have Resistance, Killzone, Halo, Gears of War, up to date Call of Duty entries, the online masterpiece Warhawk... fair enough the FPS genre has always used the latest and greatest graphics engines, and a lot of the third person games I mentioned there thrive on their ridiculously good looks too. So maybe the absence of equivalents on the Wii isn't all that surprising. What about other genres that Nintendo doesn't fill? Non-Smash-style fighting games? Capcom vs Tatsunoko and Dragonball games. Is that it? What about third person action adventure games? Entries in franchises like Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider are tailing off, and new franchises like Assassins Creed are built with the more powerful systems in mind. There's no God of War, Bayonetta or Darksiders style games heading to the Wii.. Mad World and NMH are probably as close as Wii owners can get to that. What about arcade racing and sim racing? Flight games -- weren't the Rogue Squadron games obscenely popular on the Gamecube? A decent Star Wars game on the Wii at all would be a good idea.
I was a big fan of PSO on the Gamecube, and I would have liked to have seen a game like that on the Wii, but no-one has really attempted it. People blame the crap online system on the Wii for that, but come on, the Gamecube was even more crippled. I would have liked to have seen a decent RTS, or a game that controls with a pointer the way WoW can be controlled with a mouse.
I just can't help but feel that for Nintendo - the Wii is the first console in two generations where they're really capitalising on everything they do -- while third parties just stack up the missed opportunities.
Ultimately I get the feeling third parties have decided that cross platform development on the other two platforms is more important than development on the single platform with the largest market share. That *might* be whats best for them, and that *might* be why we've been seeing what we've seen this generation with regards to Nintendo support. In a sense, lowballing the graphical capability and introducing a new control method was a double edged sword for Nintendo. Had they had these kind of sales, been graphically on par with the other two and the other two had jumped on the motion bandwagon as they will do this year -- then Nintendo would probably have better support. The thing is, they couldn't have achieved these sales without powering and positioning the Wii exactly as they did... so its all moot. We are where we are.
