Wii owners, is it our fault that the Wii U isn't getting better third party support?

[burninmylight]

I think it's a chicken/egg sort of thing. The versions of big name titles Wii owners got were often the offbranded, red-headed stepchilds of the series (Dead Rising: Chop Til' You Drop, Dead Space Extraction, Soul Calibur Legends, that Castlevania fighting game, all the Resident Evil rail shooters, dumbed down EA sports games, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles). Even the ones that were good were usually so drastically different in gameplay that they may as well have been a different IP altogether. If you're a "hardcore" gamer and you own a Wii, you were probably smart enough to steer clear of most of those. And very few of the good third party efforts we got received any sort of marketing (the Rune Factory series, Muramasa, Okami, Tenchu). If I didn't scour gaming sites daily and often, I would never have known of those games. The games that received a decent marketing push sold well enough (except Red Steel 2, but that was karma carried over from Red Steel 1).

One thing that will help the Wii U with third party support that the Wii could never have is retail games now being available as digital downloads. I tend to feel guilty when I can't afford an awesome game I want to support and have to watch it slip into the discount bin, and there are way too many Wii U games that'll have to wait on my wallet. I also hate it when a game I couldn't afford/didn't know about becomes rare and worth more money than the MSRP at its debut. By having every game available for download and using the Long Tail approach, I think third parties are more willing to support the Wii U. Instead of having a small window to make all the profit they ever will on a game, they can count on a more "evergreen" approach for people like myself to pick up all the games we could ever want on our own time.