Shovelware doesn't have to sell big #s to make money. That's what I was getting at. All it has to do is sell. 90K copies of some horse game that cost < 1 million to make makes the publisher money... especially if you consider that shovelware, sans the media hype, doesn't have the spike in sales when its first released that big titles do. 90K is actually quite a lot for an unadvertised title, and not advertising it makes it even more profitable in the end.
Shovelware for the win. Many of those shovelware titles cost *signifigantly* less than $1M to make, and at 50%/$20 gross (for the publisher, who usually screws inexperienced devs out of any decent royalties, and certainly takes *all* gross income until the dev costs are recovered) per copy, you only need 50K units sold, to turn a profit for a title that actually cost $1M to develop. Some of the titles you have listed probably cost less than $0.5M to make, because they are turned out, en masse, via 3rd-party shovelware engines (much like Shockwave games for the PC, which dominate the kids market). The publisher can make plenty by putting these titles on the shelf for $30 or $40, and raking in about half of that (the rest goes to the retailer and packaging/producing/distributing the item) per unit.
If you don't spend a lot of money, you don't risk alot, and you don't have to make a huge return on your small investment to make a profit overall. Shovelware is about playing it safe... and that's exactly the route that looks the most profitable on the Wii at this time. Numbers *make* it safe. Merely by appearing as the dominant console in the market, and by having a "general" audience (whose demographic is more difficult to characterize) the Wii is much more prone to shovelware than the other consoles, and because publishers are trying to make money -- not happy Wii gamers -- they will continue to produce it.
To salt the wound, throw in the fact that the Wii is, by far, the easiest/simplest console to develop for (even easier than the 360, by all accounts). Thus, the newbie/cheap/mass-production dev houses are drawn to it... like flies. All helping to bring on the shovelware tsunami.
