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

[Aielyn]

I don't know about other Wii owners, but I'm certainly not to blame for insufficient third-party support.

I bought a broad range of third-party offerings for the Wii. CoD (WaW and BO), Epic Mickey, Little King's Story, Red Steel (1 and 2), Goldeneye 007, de Blob, Boom Blox, No More Heroes, The Conduit, NiGHTS, Zack & Wiki, Okami, and Tiger Woods 10, to name just some of them. If I had any interest in horror games, I'd probably also own Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill Shattered Memories.

I don't yet have a Wii U, but that's mostly due to me not being in the financial position to be able to afford it right now - hopefully, within a couple of months, I'll have enough to be comfortable with buying it.

Third parties, however, have definitely let me down when it comes to the Wii. There's such an array of examples - Crystal Bearers and Spyborgs are good examples of games that were meant to be incredible, but the third parties decided to be lazy because it's the Wii. Games that demanded sequels, like Zack & Wiki and Okami, never got them. Franchises that would have been great on the Wii, like Mirror's Edge, Portal, and Metal Gear, were completely absent. Publishers routinely sent Wii versions of multiplatform titles to secondary studios, developers routinely dropped features from Wii versions. And then there's all of the franchises that the Wii only got spinoff games for - Castlevania, SoulCalibur, Final Fantasy, and Dead Space, to name some of the higher-profile examples.

And then there's the cartoonification - Wii versions of franchises getting cartoony graphics for no other reason than that they viewed the Wii as a less serious system. EA was a particular offender in this category. And the worst instance of all - third parties put out "test games" for the Wii, that were meant to test the market to see if their big games were worth putting on the system... but their standards were way too high in terms of what was a successful test, the games themselves had very low standards, and were often spinoffs, and demanded that gamers buy the games if they want the real ones, and when the "tests" were still successful, they used it as an excuse to put more test games on the system, rather than the real ones. A critical example is Resident Evil, of course.

In short, if third parties see weak sales on the Wii U, they have themselves to blame. They're the ones who treated gamers poorly, and gamers are likely to be a lot less forgiving in this generation, a lot more willing to vote with their wallets by only supporting the third parties that put the real effort in.