I think many here missed his point. While Matt might believe that 3rd party games in general don't sell well on the Wii, he was really zeroing in on the 3rd party mature games.
While the examples he picked were poor, I think he is right, but doesn't come up with any decent solutions, or even really identifying what the problem really is. The problem is the same one the DS faced but even somewhat larger. Namely, a different mode of playing the game has brought in non-traditional players, upsetting what the market place was.
When the DS came out, it was interesting, strange, but nothing really exciting. It wasn't until Nintendogs came out that it really showed what it could do. And even that wasn't really understood what it would become. Namely a game to sell pink DSes, (ie, sales to females, mostly young), and boosting up other games like animal crossing. The second set of games were the Brain Age, etc, that brought in yet another audience, older adults. But since the DS was first and got off to a good start, 3rd parties could sell their traditional fare and do all right, without doing much experimentation with the new parts of the marketplace.
Now the Wii can come, and captured the imagination of many that would buy the DS and one new group, the family/party game. While party gamers are easy to figure out, which is why all the mini-games sell well, other than Wii Sport, I'm not sure if there are any games that are really going after family players, but just treating them as just party gamers.
The 3rd party can do mature games, well, somewhat mature games, but they need to be along the lines of an interactive movie, where it can be played by one or more players, each one being a character of the plot. If there is no player for a given character, then the game plays that character.
But they need to do a better job of understanding their audience, and of marketing to that audience. They can't just throw up some ads on gamer sites, and a couple of gamer mag. ads and call it good any more. Not for many in the Wii audience. Which is I think why Zack and Wiki is doing a poorly as it is. Is it a kid's game? An amusing but difficult puzzle game? And where is the advertizing for it?
Torturing the numbers. Hear them scream.
