One thing that people never seem to pay too much attention to is the lag time between the market changing, publishers realizing that the market has changed and producing games that take advantage of the new market.
Although publishers do some of their own market analysis they also depend heavily on market analysts to give them projections of what the market will look like when a game they haven’t started will be released; what we know is that up until the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 most market analysts were expecting an inevitable drop in sales for the Wii when certain big titles were released. After Halo 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4 all failed to kill off the Wii most analysts have (finally) started to accept that it will remain the market leader long term.
Now, after you know the direction of the market you can start moving projects in that direction. Unfortunately, because the Wii isn’t similar in processing power to the HD consoles, you can’t simply switch the target platform for most games in the middle of development which means projects can only be started on the Wii as development resources become available.
Finally, even though Wii development is less expensive and requires less time most Wii games will still take 12 to 24 months to complete.
What we’re seeing from third party publishers today can best be described as the leading wave. The bigger budget more "Core" games are coming from the more proactive third party publishers who saw the direction of the industry very early on … The more "Casual" games come from both publishers who saw the movement of the industry awhile ago and didn’t have a lot of spare resources to devote to a large project, or publishers who are slow to react and will only now start considering the Wii as the dominant platform.
