True, waiting 'till April 9th for Super Paper Mario will give Sonic, SSX Blur, and any March titles a bit of breathing room, which is probably Nintendo's intention. And then you have about 7-8 weeks afterwards for Mario Party, and with those two games having a significant overlap of audience (presumably), it will give another small breather for 3rd parties to push their titles.

I can't agree more. Its not that 3rd-party games suck more on the Wii - its that its much harder to compete against Nintendo's 1st party games than it is against Sony's 1st part titles. Nintendo makes most of its money from software - Sony makes its money from licensing and hardware. Only a fraction from 1st party software.

iam looking forward to prince of persia it is a pitty that fire emblem is not in the list ...

Nintendo clearly is in a catch-22 in terms of their 1st party software. As I see it the only way out is to sell so many Wiis - as they have DS's - that there's room for both Nintendo and 3rd parties to sell lots of games. However 3rd parties need to come to the plate as well: within this period there's not a single serious Wii 3rd party exclusive coming out.

I don't remember enough about the article to find it on google, but I remember reading that (Historically) Nintendo never took into consideration the release dates of third party game when they released their games (thus ensuring that they were in direct competition with strong third party titles); the article mentioned that one of the acts of Iwata was to have far more communication between third party developers and Nintendo in order to give everyone a chance to sell well on Nintendo platforms.

What about the big 3?

i agree, i am kinda disappointed about not having any of the SSBB / SMG / MP3 available this 1st part of the year. I am afraid that means not all three will be out in 2007....

The only game on that list I may purchase is Super Paper Mario. Thankfully I have Forza 2, Mass Effect, Blue Dragon, and VF5 as possible purchases for my 360 this summer. Also Vienna is right, where is Fire Emblem? I thought it was being release in the May to June time frame?

SSBB is the one everyone figured would go first, but if Nintendo could help it I think it'd be smarter to hold it back until Wiis are plentiful on shelves, because it has the broadest appeal (LOTS of people, casual and hardcore gamers, bought a GameCube just for SSBM).

I dunno, a lot of my friends are starting to think SSBB, MP3, and SMG won't come out for a while...and that's making them mad. I'm willing wait a little bit...but I don't think it's smart for Nintendo to wait TOO long...the sooner the better in my opinion.