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Soundwave on 24 February 2015
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

The Wii had hundreds of games by that point, and 1 release every 2 months (give or take) from Nintendo has pretty much par for the course for the last 10 years.  

And things like Just Dance and uDraw became hits during this period. 

I think the more plausible reason Wii sales slowed is became Kinect and Move came out and the rise of iOS/Google Play app market creating far more intense competetion for the hearts/minds of the casual player. In that tug of war, Nintendo ultimately lost. Also the when every system basically could play Wii Sports (well Kinect Sports, Sport Champions ... same sh*t, stand in front of your TV and pretend to play tennis/golf/etc. by waving your arms around), it nullified the Wii's uniqueness. 

To be honest I'm not sure why MS/Sony even waited so long to copy it, they probably could've slowed Wii sales down much earlier. 

The Wii only outsold the XBox 360 once in NPD after Nov. 2010's release of Kinect. 

From the list I posted it's pretty obvious that Nintendo almost exclusively published small sellers from 2011 onwards. Plus the lists from 2006-2010 show about a dozen of retail games per year (many of which were far bigger IPs than what they published in 2011 and 2012), plus some WiiWare releases.

Your explanation is only more plausible for someone who dislikes the Wii. Anyone who looks objectively at the release schedules will conclude that the earlier years had not only more frequent releases, but also installments in significantly bigger IPs.


They only published 5 new games in 2009. 

Nintendo never has been a company that releases a new game every month, and not having to release huge games towards the second half of a console cycle is just normal. 

Microsoft didn't release anything huge in 2010/2011 either outside of Halo 4 and Kinect Sports, yet they trounced Nintendo after the release Kinect. 

I don't dislike the Wii, I don't think it's god's gift to gaming either, I think it was a nice play for Nintendo that worked out for a few years, but things change. 

You're also ignoring that there were several third party hits for the Wii during this period. Like on one hand you can say well things like Metroid Prime and Punch-Out! type releases didn't matter to the Wii, well ok, so what difference does it make that Nintendo slowed down publishing those types of games? The Wii had games like Just Dance, which is probably the third biggest casual breakout hit on the platform (after Wii Sports and Fit) come in 2010, uDraw, EA Active, around that time too and there were lots of other casual games still coming for the platform.

Yet we see the Wii get beaten soundly by MS and Sony virtually every month after the Kinect and Move are released. It don't think that's entirely a coincidence.