Red - I got this point covered already. There were no new games like Zelda or Super Mario Galaxy, despite the audience for large scale action-adventures and 3D platformers being there. The reason being that third parties don't want to invest in the Wii and rather go with their third and fourth string teams. If Nintendo made a TPS that sold 5+m, third parties would shrug and say "well, it's a Nintendo game" and put out more casual stuff.

Orange -

No, really. Do you actually believe what you have written? NSMB Wii doesn't cater to the "core" audience? You honestly think that the "core" audience would hold off of buying good games because of the way the console itself or the games are advertised?

And why would SMG2, Zelda and Metroid encourage third parties to make more core games? The Wii already had those games in one form or another, but now, two years after they have all been released, where are all these third party core games that were supposed to come out? The easiest answer is often the right one: Third parties don't want to make these games.

Blue - This isn't a problem that can be fixed by throwing money at it. Talent is rare in this business, so there are only so many games that can be made at the same time. Paying off third parties isn't really going to help either, because all their most talented developers are already working on 360/PS3 games.

Why isn't Nintendo willing to do it? Well, did you ever look at the sales charts? There's no need to act desperately and as I have previously said, it shouldn't be required to moneyhat third parties for every single game. The Wii offers a good environment for third parties to succeed (highest software sales, lowest development costs, biggest userbase), it's just that for some reason they don't want to try.

What that reason is? Third parties want to be in the driver's seat of this industry. They want to be the ones who decide about the fate of video game machines. If that is the case, then console manufacturers will fight over them and pay for exclusivity or fund entire games. Their ideal world is Sony and Microsoft having about even shares of the market (with Nintendo being a minor player, because they are evil and refuse to moneyhat like the other two), because if one would become too successful, there wouldn't be much reason to pay off third parties.

Now of course things developed differently compared to what was expected by the industry. Nintendo became the dominant player and that is the nightmare scenario for third parties. Nintendo is good to go alone, they don't have to rely on third parties like Sony and Microsoft. In case third parties would fully back the Wii, Nintendo would only become more dominant which is exactly what they don't want. So they decided to fight Nintendo with all they've got. Pretty much all major games go to the HD consoles, but not the Wii. They come up with reasons why the games aren't coming to the Wii, but over time those reasons became more and more questionable. Low software sales? Games get ported for the PSP, not the Wii. The Wii hardware isn't capable of running the game? But no problem to bring the game to the PSP or lately, also the iPhone.

Since you are so proud of this point, I should confront you with an interesting thought:

The way the DS is advertised is very similar to the Wii. But for some reason the DS gets flooded with core games by third parties, including genres that had no Nintendo precedent of having an audience. And those games sell well, otherwise they would stop being made. So what makes the Wii so different from the DS?

It's all the Western third parties. They don't mind Nintendo being the dominant player in the portable market since historically they never really bothered with handheld games and they still don't really do. If you made a list of the 100 best handheld games made in the past 20 years, the vast majority would come from Japan, because Japanese third parties don't see portables as second rate gaming machines.

Home consoles are a different story. That is where the blockbusters go and so far, no Western third party has made a AAA game for the Wii. Japanese third parties don't seem to be so much anti-Nintendo, but most of them prefer the HD consoles because they want to be like Western third party publishers. You can get that from interviews where Japanese developers state that the Japanese gaming industry has fallen behind its Western counterparts (while ironically it's a Japanese company, Nintendo, that rules the worldwide sales charts).

That's not how it works, Carl. You assume that there is a certain pool of games that absolutely has to go to portables, so if the competition performs poorly, everything goes to the other option. That's wrong. All gaming platforms are in competition with one another when it comes to software support. For example, Dragon Quest was never supposed to become a handheld exclusive before this generation started.

You also seem to make the argument that nearly 50 % in market share in the home console space doesn't justify development of major core third party games. Is that what you are saying? It has to be, because you should want to be consistent with your previous posts.

quoted for people who didn't read it the first time.

All I got out of your post is that third parties lack the competence to make a good game.

Btw, your conclusion is contradicting the rest of your post. You highlight Super Mario Galaxy as a clever game and say that such a game costs a lot of money, but we know that it was cheaper to make than the majority of HD titles. Therefore costs can't be the reason why there aren't more clever games on the Wii. It must be that third parties suck at making games and being aware of it, that's why they don't bother to try. That at least is a logical explanation.