Other M is doing decent even with the rampant piracy issue the Wii currently facing.  It has sold 460K units in it's first month; while it's no Halo: Reach that number is quite successful and will definetly hit gold status. There is a good possibility that with the upcoming holiday season; Other M could hit 600K and probably 700-800K within a year of release.  Hopefully Nintendo, could do something regarding the piracy issue by having games require the most updated firmware to boot up thus alleviating piracy issue a bit.

I think that is a good thing.  

Not if they shelf the franchise indefinitely.

They won't necessarily shelve it but try to figure out what went wrong with MoM.   If they do an honest appraisal of the game I'm sure they can figure out what went wrong and what would  be popular with the most gamers.  With MoM they made a game with limited appeal IMHO

I don't think Nintendo will shelf the Metroid series because Other M sold "ONLY" 500K copies in it's first month!!! In addition, the Metroid series on average has been about 800K-1.4M units in sales and in any case Other M is on it's way in acheiveing those numbers. (I see sales of ~600K by christmas2010 and ~740K within a year of release and  850K-1M lifetime)  The Conduit which is getting a sequel got even less than what Other M sold in month during it's lifetime.  In addition, piracy (the Wii's achille's heel) has also played a part in softening sales for the game. One of the torrent sites I follow had 47K download for the title since it was released; and that's just one site. (that's why piracy is a cancer to this industry and I don't believe in that homebrew crap)

yeah because it's the developer's only halfway decent selling game. I bet Nintendo or even Team Ninja have some projects, that could lead to more profit.

Yeah, one of them being Other M, which is already a profitable venture for both Team Ninja and Nintendo; seeing the average cost to develop and market a  Wii game and how many copies  this game had already sold and should sell this holiday season!!!

they'll make a relatively small profit at the end of the day.
But you don't seem to get what I'm saying. Nintendo has much much much bigger game series than Metroid. They could've made Mario Party 9 or even Wii Music 2 *shudder* in the meantime, so again no matter how profitable Metroid is, it's making less money than these potential titles, thus even losing profit, that is admittedly not there, but easily could have been there.

I'll say it again a huge company like Nintendo doesn't give a fuck about the profits of Metroid Other M. They're way to small to get really noticed, thus making it at least possible for Nintendo to maybe just shelf the whole franchise.

Except Nintendo rightly doesn't work that way. All series have to be profitable, yes, but Nintendo still maintain a wide range of series that don't make the sales that their top games do (Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Kirby etc. etc.) because a console needs more than just the infrequent big titles, it needs a regular stream of mid-level hits too.

And no, Nintendo would never have put Sakamoto and Team Ninja on Wii Music 2 (or Mario Party while Wii Party was in development), because that would have to be done by one of their top teams.

and yet there are some franchises they seldom bring back, so you'll never know

And I never said that Team Ninja would do Wii Music 2 or Mario Party 9 lol. They will obviously have their own projects like Dead Or Alive 5.