You do realise GTA:CW is the same "amazing game from a great brand that had great advertising and still it failed" in the PSP, right? So it follows from your logic that the Sony userbase doesn't want the GTAs just as much as it does that the Nitnendo userbase doesn't want the GTAs.

So, do you really think Sony products can't sell GTA?

While we focus heavily on how Nintendo’s strategy to disrupt the market has achieved great success of impacting Sony and Microsoft, I think we often forget to consider that they have impacted the entire gaming market and not just the console manufacturers. It’s very true that Sony and Microsoft were heavily invested in the conventional strategy of advancing games by advancing the underlying technology through more advanced hardware; but it is also very true that most third party publishers have tied themselves to that strategy for more than a decade.

In a way, many of these publishers have not been able to come to terms with the concept that the values that the Wii is based on are as important (or possibly more important) to most gamers so they justify its success by assuming that it is successful because its userbase is made up of entirely new gamers and of very passive/casual gamers from previous systems. They can’t believe that someone who owns an XBox 360 and Wii would choose to have a game like Resident Evil made for the Wii, so they pretend that we don’t exist; and they ignore all evidence to the contrary.

To me, it seems similar to how the big 3 car manufacturers reacted to the success of small cars from the 1960s until the 1990s. Because of the initial success that small cars like the Beetle and the early mustangs had with students and as a second car for most families of modest income, up until fairly recently the big 3 car manufacturers considered small cars as a cheap product to introduce people to your brand so that when they were able to afford a "Real" car they would upgrade to one of your larger nicer vehicles. The thought that someone would choose to drive a compact car even though they could afford a full sized sedan never really occurred to the executives at these companies.

This meant that these companies continued to churn out inexpensive, low quality cars with almost no investment in R&D to make nicer small cars for decades while the Japanese manufacturers (Toyota, Honda, Datsun/Nissan) focused heavily on producing higher quality small cars. In many cases these small cars shared many of the same values as the cars American manufacturers were pushing (like luxury, performance or style) but American companies continued to assume that people were choosing these vehicles for other reasons; like their lower cost, better fuel economy, and what not.

I don’t think these companies realized that people actually wanted smaller cars until Honda, Toyota and Nissan really started to eat away at their market-share in the late 1990s; and by that point in time these companies were 10 years behind their competition.

Some of the logic is these posts is astonishingly stupid. You people are really, I mean really, just something to behold. It's stunning really.

Do you people really have any idea about the demographics and purchase patterns of Wii owners? Your bulk of users are ages 3-17 and you have the largest constituency of users age 50 and older. The 18-35 crowd lives on the 360 and PS3. They are the ones who, generally speaking, buy the games drawing your complaints. They just don't exist on your console. You Wii gamers -and you are hardcore gamers for the most part- are the minority of Wii owners. You are swamped in your system by 7 year olds and middle agers who think Wii Fit is a video game.

You people represent the EXACT same business model as Nintendo's last two generations. Take away the gimmicks and Wii-cercise garbage and you have the same system as N64 and Gamecube only staying in the game because we all want Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Yes, we all know Brawl is fun, so is Mario Kart. Still, you don't have the demographics. READ YOUR SYSTEM'S CURRENT AND UPCOMING RELEASES and you can see who the games are being made for!!!!!! The mature titles are the rare outliers!!!!! Here is your market for Wii:

Pony Friends 2
Step to the Beat
Sponge Bob's Boating Bash
Build A Bear Workshop
Dance Sensation
Fix it Home Improvement Challenge
Diva Girls: Diva Ballerina
Playmobil Circus
And if you aren't too lazy you know that I could go ON and ON with Ponies, Rainbows, Hunting Simulators and Step Aerobics.

EDIT: Please don't take this as an insult to Wii-playage or ownage.  I think Wii has a lot of great stuff.  Unforunately the vast vast bulk of it is the exact 5 or so core titles we see every iteration.  The Wii gamer market isn't special or different.  You are just playing sharing a console's fate with an expanded market of people who would have never have bought a system before.  Let's get anecdotal: I know 7 households with Wii, 2 are over 50 couples, and 2 are my grad student friends who happen to be female and they (both) own NSMBWii, Wii Sports, and Guitar Hero, and that's it.  All of these people mentioned ignore their Wii's for large periods of time.    

"Seventy-nine percent of Wii gamers are male, most older than 18 with an income of $50,000 or more and more than half game for five or more hours a week, Dunaway said.

While the people who buy Wii tend to be pretty typical for gaming, the other household members who play Wii aren't, she said."

http://kotaku.com/5010227/nintendo-wii-gamers-are-hardcore-gamers

Facts just get in the way of arguments, don't they?

NO. You're using dated demographics from a 2 year old Kotaku article.  Work a little harder.  Facts are fine.

A 2-year-old report is still a report. You can't claim facts are fine when you don't back up your claims.

Why do you take offense about who uses your preferred system? Look up a little research from Nielsen. Your main market is 3-11 and 24-34 females. You have the largest 50+ market. Incidentally, Wii is also the least used console, bringing truth to the "dust-gatherer" moniker. Whatever, boys, nobody is telling you not to have fun. You're just wrong about why games do and don't sell on your systems. Have a good evening.

I got some stuff archived from the past that applies to this; it pretty much sums up what I would say about this, in words that I couldn't come up with myself.

"A good product is marketed like this: "Hey, look at all of these cool bells and whistles that you'll get if you buy [product]! [Product] is awesome!"
Most of the "test games" for the Wii from third parties have been marketed to core Wii gamers like this: "Buy [product] if you want to see more of [product category]. And we swear that the next [product] will be better than this half-hearted effort! All we need are sales of this one!"
Do you see what's wrong with this picture? Third parties are marketing their core-market "test games" to nobody. The only incentive that they present for buying one of these "test games" is to see other games on the core market. They think that consumers (core-market consumers in particular, but also consumers in general) are stupid enough to throw their money away on a product that has no discernable benefit to them except for a vague promise of something better in the future that you'll have to pay even more money for.

Basically, they're approaching the whole concept wrong. If they had released a game that consumers wanted for its own benefits, they would have succeeded. But this "test game" garbage is nothing more than negative marketing, and time and again the sales numbers have shown that it doesn't work because consumers are too smart to fall for it. And then, each and every time, the developers or publishers of the "test game" wring their hands and state, "Look! There's no market for core games on the Wii!"

In reality, they're just self-fulfilling their own dire prophecies.

"The “Game Industry” wants Nintendo to abandon its disruptive ways and return to the traditional core ways. While third parties say a Wii HD allows them to easily port over their game, this is also a lie. The “Game Industry” froze the Gamecube even though it had the same install base as the Xbox. Gamecube was deliberately left out.

And as this generation began, the “Game Industry” declared either further niche of Nintendo or its outright destruction as a console company. All analysts “agreed” that Nintendo would be last place. It is clear that the “Game Industry” wants Nintendo to be a game company, but not a console company. They want Nintendo to make Mario and Zelda and port it to all the systems." Nintendo was increasingly isolated. Hilariously, the increase of Nintendo’s isolation was blamed on Nintendo. Many people believed this. No matter how far Nintendo would go with making development easier, with reaching out to third parties, with even allowing third parties to make games using their IPs, the console was consistently frozen. Remember that the Dreamcast, also, was easy to develop for. None of that mattered."

So, after being on the market for 2 years the demographics suddenly shifted because core-gamers secretly sold their Wii's and these were purchased by "The Kiddies"?

I have never understood how we can go from arguments of core gamers complaining that "My Wii is just gathering dust because there is nothing interesting to play" to "No core gamers own Wii systems so core games couldn’t sell on the Wii" in a matter of minutes on this website. Core gamers do own a Wii, they are part of the reason Nintendo’s quality crossover games are selling to new heights, and they have been waiting for decent third party efforts for over 3 years.

Archive 'jive' continued:

"The core games people complain about are:
• The Conduit
• Little King's Story
• Muramasa
• MadWorld
• No More Heroes
and I better not forget the test game. Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles.
But we better not list Zelda, Metroid, or Mario as core games, because the fact they are made by Nintendo automatically nulls out that people bought them because they want core games. Monster Hunter 3 doesn't count because it is the best selling console version, but not as popular as the portable version. DQIX won't count for another stupid reason too, but we'll have to wait to find out what that is.
Also, maybe the userbase is big enough, that some people want Just Dance 2, while others want a on time and equal quality (with exception of graphics) version of Call of Duty. Just dance sold 1.5m so far. So ~2% of the userbase. That 2% does not represent what 100% of Wii owners want. Call of Duty: Gimped at War sold 1.5m, which also represents 2% of the userbase. So why did Activision decide to delay Modern Warfare Reflex and not release Modern Warfare 2?

I'm still waiting for someone to list the Assassin's Creeds, GTAs, Final Fantasy games that have flopped on the Wii. But hey, if you want to know where the Bionic Commando's are for the Wii, well, that flopped on the HD systems too.
Aren't we talking 3rd party? And MH is one 3rd party exclusive...
Maybe it is big enough, but after 3 years it still hasn't been proven. But i think this sums it up with Wii...
"Now, put a whole bunch of money/effort into creating a new core game on Wii with a risk of it bombing... Or quickly make Just Dance 2 with extra tracks, more moves, a few more features, and guarentee an easy profit."
Blame Nintendo for giving the Wii the image it has.
Monster Hunter is the ONLY 3rd party exclusive that is actually worth mentioning. However, like I said, name one game that would be like a GTA or Assassin's Creed that flopped and you can't (note, this doesn't mean actually AC or GTA, but games with the same production values). There have been 0 blockbuster attempts on Wii that have failed. Maybe this is because no one has tried, but if so, then you can't use it as an argument that they do.

Also, Just Dance 2 isn't an easy profit. Look at Shaun White Snowboarding. It was a HUGE success on Wii compared to PS360. So what did they do? More of the exact same thing and guess what happened, the Wii audience dismissed it because there wasn't enough change. Look at the Guitar Hero/Rock Band scene. The games were doing great (also doing great on Wii) and they kept on putting out more of the same, and now the most recent versions are flopping (in comparison and probably in general). If you look at the party sports games, they are selling worse and worse every single time. There is no guarantee that Just Dance 2 will succeed, and Nintendo has never once shown that repeat games will sell on the Wii. In fact, they've shown that ports from the previous generation flop horribly with the New Play Control series.
I'll bring up LAIR. The game was supposed to be EPIC, it was AAA, it had a big budget, it would save the PS3, and it didn't sell. In fact, it essentially put the dev right out of business. Now why put a bunch of money/effort into creating a new core game on PS3 with a risk of it bombing? You ask this question as if core games are a guaranteed sell on the HD systems but they aren't. The only reason we see more "core" games selling well on the PS360 is because they are actually put there. When it comes to multiplatform titles, they get put on PS3, X360, PSP yet the PSP version usually sells horribly (assassin's creed anyone, or the soon to be Dante's Inferno). There is no reason they need to shun the Wii because it "isn't powerful enough". Heck, Street Fighter IV is on iPhone and hopefully PSP, but still no mention of Wii even though it would work perfectly fine and Tatsunoko is selling well.

The Wii never had a chance to break any imaginary image that the industry put on the thing, because no one ever gave it a chance. Nintendo isn't kiddy, they are family and they make quite a wide range of titles from E-T (and publish a few M titles). They wouldn't stop a single GTA, AC, or FF from being put on the system, heck, they have the most violent murder simulator ever on the Wii. Because 3rd parties have refused to put the main titles on the system (or ever try once) there is a false notion that Wii owners don't want good games. Heck, Resident Evil 4 is about to pass the GC version, and all Capcom provides is a light gun test game (I like light gun games, but they don't make for a good test for other types of games) to see if the market wants more 3rd person horror games.
In summation, you can't say that Wii can't sell big 3rd party core games, when there are none, and you can't say that 3rd party core games are a safer bet on PS360. You also can't say that it is guarantee that kiddy party games will sell, as I can point out hundreds of those that have flopped too.

It is not Nintendo's responsibility to ensure third parties achieve success on the Wii. Third parties obviously don't want to, and have either given up on the console or resigned to moderate successes here and there. Could Nintendo do more to aid them? Of course, but what's in it for them? Nintendo is monstrously successful whether third parties live or die. 

That's why I feel it is important to illustrate that the problem lies with third parties. Wii 2 in HD isn't going to fix things if third party devs continue to think they can shit out games. In my opinion, the answer to all the questions you posed in your post as it relates to them is the same; third parties must take the Wii's successor seriously. Period. If they don't, clearly nothing Nintendo can do will sway them.


 [To use a company as an example]THQ has never been known for making remarkable AAA games and everything they actually put effort into on the Hd systems seems to get less and less attention. Hell they've basically been reduced to spamming every TV channel with adds for UFC 09 and Red Faction Guerilla every commercial break for about a strait month (at god only knows what cost). If only someone had told them Pro-Wrestling/Boxing/Professional Fighting games haven't earned serious coin since the N64/PS1 era or that a generic shooter whose entire sales pitch is a new destructable environment engine is perhaps not the way to capture gamer's imagination. 

As for the Wii, the Wii isn't so much a Nightmare for third party developers as it is a money making puzzle. And while even a three year old could figure out this puzzle, industry professionals either can't or don't want to. Who'da thunk it? Putting bargain-bin efforts on a less than mainstream gaming platform isn't paying off for developers? Didn't see that coming! Hey I know, let's blame Nintendo for not paying for our commercials and buying exclusivity to our titles like MS and Sony do.

I'm sure many developers are convinced this is all the Wii's fault too for not making a console they could just port HD games to and that the Wii's popularity has taken away too many potential consumers to make the expense of HD gaming a viable financial venture. And yes, Nintendo is partially to blame for their role in this whole debacle, their lack of balance in focus and overall shortsightedness in ambition for the Wii has not only relegated them to being outsiders in the industry but helped in polarizing gaming between Hardcore and Casual with no room left for the once "core" norm. Ironically, Nintendo's the only thing in the Gaming Industry not going broke and in contrast is actually thriving like never before (despite their disatisfying performance in the eyes of gamers), so we have to take stock of the situation in placing any blame on them. And while everyone can acost them for not playing ball, inversely, Nintendo could acost the industry for not stepping up to even put a half-hearted effort towards making their console a viable lifeline for rolling with the punches in these tough times.

Nintendo stood their ground and the industry stood its ground, and in the end both lost out in different ways, though financially, Nitnendo is the only one smiling.

But even then, to place blame on the industry itself is only adressing part of the problem for third party developers this generation. The far more integral segment of this equation is this new breed of Gamers.

The entire industry in its haste to make a quick buck has cultivated a consumer that only wants hollywood calibur formulaic hardcore games. No wonder unique and fringe Genres are struggling, you have an industry now where the target consumer is either school kids who think anything with explosions and guns is cool or frat boys that wouldn't even be playing video games today if it wasn't for the original Xbox and prevailing hardcore trends cemented by the 360 and PS3. There's a reason why JRPGs are dying and failing in sales. There's a reason why any game that isn't hardcore, grimdark or gritty is relegated to mediocrity outside of non-gaming circles. Congratulations Gaming Industry, you somehow managed to replace the typical tried and true JRPG grinding, platforming jumping, Japanese Developer loving Core gamer with a Xenophobic, anti-anything Japanese targeted, piracy-prone, Hardocre, Spike TV-watching Subnormer who thinks Halo is the best game ever made and only plays video games so he can shit talk 13 year olds online and frag his brah Skeeter.