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h2ohno on 27 April 2020
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1. SNES had the best quality plus great quantity
2. NES. It was basically the only game in town, so third parties had no choice but to develop for it. In terms of quantity it can't be beat, though technical limitations hurt the quality.
3. Gameboy. Similar to the NES.
4. GBA. Great in both quality and quantity, but too many of its best third party games were SNES ports in my opinion.
5. DS. Very good argument for it ranking higher than the other handhelds.
6. Switch. Not perfect and many older ports, but it's still shocking how good third party support has been and what franchises we never thought we'd see on a Nintendo system have been coming.
7. Wii. I think the third party support was great for the Wii. Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, Activision all released a lot of great games for the Wii. I have more 3rd party games for Wii than for any other system, though Switch is going to catch up soon. Instead of looking at what it doesn't have (Bioshock, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls), look at what it does have.
9. Gamecube. Has a reputation for multiplats being worse on it because of issues with the smaller disks, but a good library all the same. As the generation went on its support seemed to get worse even with RE4 towards the end. Very close to the Wii overall I think.
8. 3DS. It received a lot of support because it was the only successful handheld its generation, but it feels like first party games propelled it more than with previous Nintendo handhelds. Capcom was really excellent with RE Revelations and the Monster Hunters.
9. Wii U. It gets the edge over N64 because of the indie scene bolstering its library. But with its early glut of inferior ports and latter desert of major third party games it's at the bottom.
10. N64. It's not like it had nothing, but this was the gen third parties jumped ship the most. The lack of third parties caused huge gaps in the library, especially of RPGs, that no other Nintendo system has suffered from. Paper Mario came out at the very end of the generation and there was basically nothing else.