Being secretive is natural when your company can be wiped out by a lack of creativity combined with a burst of overenthusiastic competition. Unless you want your strategy turned against you before you even bring it to bear, when you're in a position where you can't buy power, you keep quiet about what you're up to until it's too late to stop the disruption you have in mind, let alone jumpstart it without you.
That said, their tight-lipped nature about the Wii only really caught the uncreative developers off guard. The creative ones adapted to it quickly enough, and even looked upon it in favor for simultaneously being cheap to develop for and having better interface options than the usual "6 to 12 buttons + 2 analog sticks" setup. The ones hit hardest by the Wii's success were the ones who were unprepared to deal with the possibility of a market shift. If they do not adapt, that's fine; there are plenty of developers who also fell to that trap when the console market exploded in the mid-1980s.
And funnily enough, the situation is again like the 1980s. The uncreative developers who refuse to adapt and only complain are dying off or going niche, while the ones who are adapting are thankful for the Wii and aren't complaining at all. It's a sink-or-swim market, and always has been. A 20-year period of the same rules is no excuse for getting caught off guard by the very same thing that gave many of these now-floundering developers their first real break.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
