In my opinion, "AAA" really boils down to "development and marketing budget" -- and this game certainly qualifies.

If you can't consider huge budget, huge marketing, or huge sales, (all three of which this game had) as a definition of "AAA", what do you consider to be the definition? It certainly *isn't* review scores.

This is a AAA game, if ever there was one. If you want to claim its not, you're going to have to explain why.

The "legs" issue is the only outstanding one... at this point, this game needs legs on the Wii in order to stand up to the HD versions. I'm sure its still paying the bills -- the license almost ensures that. But this is a strong indicator for 3rd parties, as to which console to focus on, as a primary, and that could be a concern for Wii owners in the future, with regards to overall game quality.

So far, the legs on the Sports titles do recover some of the ground lost early on, but the Wii never fully recovers in any case, even by the end of the year cycle, at which most sports titles completely die off. The HD platforms always end up looking much more attractive for these titles, from a return % and net income point-of-view.

The most active gamers are between the age of 15-25 (more or less), and that's precisely the people that buy/play more on the HD consoles. How will this affect the Wii? I really don't think publishers are very happy that most of their games sell very well for just a few weeks, they'd prefer selling constantly even if it is a small amount but for longer periods of times, just like Nintendo has been doing with Nintendogs, Mario kart etc.

I'm thinking the same. In a perfect world games'll have great openings and steady sales for long periods of times; but we aren't in a perfect world and few games get both things.

You haven't quoted Pro Sports titles... you quoted cartoony "kid" sports games as examples for the Wii.

All that really suggests is that kids games have a large audience on the Wii... but I think we knew that already.

That's kind of a side issue -- important, yes, but I wanted to focus more on "grownup" AAA titles.  Point taken though -- any game focused on a younger audience does very very well on the Wii, for certain.  I kinda thought any Starwars title would fit into that category as well.

So I suppose Tiger Woods 07 08 and 09 have sold better on the HD's because of the bigger openings... not.

Tiger woods is the exception, sadly.  Hardly the rule.  There are half a dozen pro sports titles on the PS360 that say exactly the opposite.

That would be another interesting discussion though -- why golf, and not other sports on the Wii?

I think what the OP is saying is that THE ps2 never had to deal with this. For being the leader of this GEN, the wii is not dominating in the multiplatform area. It might change later on, but I doubt it. With games getting better and better looking on the HD consoles, its going to tough choosing the wii when choosing these games.

Top Spin 3 sold the same on every platform.
Madden sold the same on Wii and PS3 despite the huge discrepance on their opening weeks.
Pro Evolution Soccer sells much less because it's released half a year later.
Wii Sports outsold every other HD sports game ever released /thread.

Star Wars:TFU on the Wii outsold the rest of the versions in Others this week. This argument is a little harder to believe because of that.

where?