My thoughts are that Nintendo made some business decisions over the last few generations and third parties shied away from their system. Now that the Wii is out, and currently dominating the sales charts, these other publishers have moved on to other systems. A majority of the games that they do decide to make for Wii are not given the full attention they deserve.
A second point, related more to the success of the third party games (Madworld, Dead Space, etc..) is that the gamers who would actually buy these games have also moved on to other systems over the last few generations to play the third party games that were taken elsewhere.
At this point I feel that Nintendo has some work to do in order to get the third party publishers and gamers back to the Nintendo console in the way they once were. Do I think this can happen during the Wii's lifetime? I doubt it.. There are enough complaints about the good third party games on the Wii by these other gamers and I am not sure how to convince them to give the games a chance.
I played Madworld in front of several of my friends and they were all really impressed and they all said "This is a Nintendo game? I actually like this game and will have to get it." To this day not one of them have bought it and they all own a Wii. They go out and buy like five games at a time for the 360 or PS3 and some of them don't get played for months but they won't go and buy one of the high quality Wii titles. One of them bought GTA4 when it released and FINALLY started playing this past week.
I am not sure what the solution is. I know that Nintendo releases awesome first and second party games and, in my opinion, those games are good enough to warrant the purchase of a Wii. The third party games are hit and miss but the ones that hit still hit good just like back in the day.
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