@xerostomia: You're welcome.
As for Sony, keep in mind, that everything that looks stupid in retrospect with PS3, made sense in the last gen context, during the PS3 developement. If Wii would have been a console designed for power race, PS3 would be doing better. But since it featured values, that have been the primary reason for each winning console to "win", and PS3 overshot its previous market (PS2 sold a lot for being a cheap DVD player for kids room, that you could play games with).
As for the exclusives, what reason is there for a developer to to make an exclusive anyway? M$ can't moneyhat the publishers forever, Wii is exceeding 50% marketshare, etc. The time it takes to port a multiplatform game, is additional cost and the game needs to sell a certain amount of copies in order to make the cost back (and this isn't enough, since you could make something more profitable instead of porting). The big publishers make their games first for PS360 and then, either port it to Wii, make "Wii specific" version at the same time, or a PS2/Wii multiplatform version. The smaller ones have bigger interest to develope for Wii, due to lower costs. In the worst case, if Wii is the leading platform, the porting from Wii to HD consoles, can be more expensive, than making the game for Wii in the first place, if the graphics get upgraded a lot. Which means, that the sales expectations have to meet the ones with Wii expectations, so the porting isn't always a good option (and, multiplatform releases don't usually sell as well as exclusives, atleast not relatively).
It's case specific, when a game can be multiplatfor or exclusive and there propably are various factors leading to a decision.
In the case of game sales, 360 have been out longer, which helps in game sales for the older titles and Wii has larger number of games, where the sales are distributed more evenly.
Then the sales expectations; people seem to have a very twisted view about sales, just because a couple of big IP:s have sold tremendous amount of copies, when most of the games sell only hundreds of thousands copies. The profitability of there titles is what counts the most. As i said, the thing that Activision moved millions of copies of one of its biggest IP:s, isn't helping the dozen devs, who have hard time to break even with 500k units sold.
I do know what you mean with your Mario/Starcraft example, but i still think you have the wrong approach for the subject. Most of the gamers do not have multiple consoles, so when "game X" gets them to buy a certain console, they buy other games that intrest them for their console. So if "Mario" or "Starcraft" gets them to buy the console, they are propably to buy a new game and in reality, we don't have new "Mario" or "Starcraft" often. Between "Marios" and "Starcrafts", people buy other games too. The argument works for other consoles just as well; how do you compete with GTA and COD? We don't have 5M+ sellers too often on any console. The games that reach that high number are very rare, so the profit should be made with the less selling games (which most of them are), when it doesn't matter who the publisher, with the blockbusters, is, if it's not the publisher, who is thinking about releasing a game on a certain platform.
