If you go back to the past couple of generations most breakout successes happened on the second or third game in a series ... The reason for that it simple, you could develop a game on a moderate budget and put forward minimal marketing and off of very modest sales you could recover your costs; and if you had decent sales (say 500,000 units) you could put more money towards development and marketing and aim for higher sales. Eventually some of these games hit the threshold of having a good enough game that was well enough marketed that it crossed a threshold and hit new sales levels.
I could be wrong but I suspect that (although they would be based as failures on this website) many publishers would be pleased with the sales of their new IPs if they pass the 500,000 mark on the Wii ... and in my opinion that should be how we define success.
