1. The core market for third party games was there, in the beginning. Third parties (and to a lesser degree, Nintendo), failed to capitalize on that. Some early games banked an easy million even if they weren't all that good, but follow-up efforts never came. Test games never saw the follow-through, even if they were successful (like Umbrella Chronicles)

2. You can't call Metroid the end-all of FPS, and many Metroid fans (not me, i'm one of the few who classes Metroid Prime as an FPS) would find it insulting to do so. We can only imagine what would have happened if Infinity Ward had actually debased themselves enough to develop Modern Warfare simultaneously for Wii.

3. Its an environment where 3rd parties still think they're the king like gens 5 and 6, when it's become quite clear that they're not. The age of manufacturers bending over backwards for them should be over, and rightly so.

This is making a lot of sense.

1. No. You can't deny that Nintendo had a different set of intentions and it worked out for them, Nintendo had a specific idea of a console in mind and that's what they got. Third Parties have to work around that and despite earlier efforts, it didn't work out. When they continue to try (NMH2, Red Steel 2) their only punished with lower sales. The only reason Nintendo needed test games is because the console was a risk to develop on.

2. Metroid is an FPS, the same way Bioshock, The Darkness and Half Life are FPS. World at War had a simultaneous release and the game sold significantly less than it's HD counterparts. Like I mentioned before, the Wii isn't as easy to develop for as many like to think because it uses a different control format, it's online system is buggy and the system is underpowered. People are also under the assumption that all Third Party games should be multi-platform, I don't because it takes away unnecessary effort away from the consoles that we know will sell enough copies. 

3. Manufacturers need Third Parties to support their platform, people blame the Wii's significant drop in sales recently because of it's lack luster software support, then that shows that software still drives the platform. The only reason you follow that line of thinking is because your strictly a Wii gamer, but had my PS3 got no Third party support I would have sold it. I don't know about you, but I play more than 5 games a year. 

This far into the generation, we're still droning on about how 3rd parties are evil idiots? Where's the 3rd party bingo board?

Maybe they are the smart form of moron?

By the time it became apparant that the Wii was going to be a success (Holiday 2006 at the earliest) they had no relevant games to bring to the Wii in progress. Since most good games require a minimum of 18-30 months development with between 6-18 months of pre-production it would take between 2 - 4 years before any efforts started around the time of the Wii launch came to fruition. However since most games developers from publishers were already tied up for projects on the Xbox 360/PS3 and were halfway through development, the publishers best ROI would have had to have been to keep the good/decent projects on the Xbox 360/PS3 and any bad projects were probably scrapped and the developers refocused onto the Wii. Since these are poorer developers and given a time constraint to take advantage of the Wii success, comedy ensued aka shovelware.

By 2007/2008 it was apparant which studios were successful and which were not. The successful (good) studios were kept on task to release Xbox 360/PS3 content and still more average studios were probably tasked with Wii development. This is the point where we start to see better but not great content coming out for the Wii whilst the fewer battle tested excellent third party developers remained tasked with Xbox 360/PS3 content. This explains the content coming out in 2009/2010 and some of 2011.

I'm not saying third party support is non-essential, but its clearly peripheral to hardware sales at this point, outside of a few key franchises and regions. I buy and play third party games too, but they're non-essential for the manufacturers' hardware sales.

And on point 2, developers seem to be willing to overcome hurdles to port elsewhere, into even more hostile environments (PSP). There has to be something underlying here.

actually reason psp get games that its sony got better deals with third parties and support them in everything, also sony makes software engines to make it easier.

not that machine can sell software, or userbase or raw power. though is known psp got a very core Userbase especially in japan.

have u seen imsomniac talk about sony? they sure know how to get developers happy, they support it even the game probably not going to break a million.

and DS did got a assasin creed, kh spinsoff, even if nintendo was pretty much always a jerk in before gamecube failed.

also another thing, wii demographic isn't all shooter core that third party developers like to do.

remenber dead rising? u know what happen.

I'd give a longer answer but I've got go out,  sorry.

Like I said earlier, the PSP (similar to the DS) costs much less to develop for and I'm betting that Sony puts a lot of effort into convincing these publishers to create these cheap games. Sony had a marketing deal with Ubisoft for Assassins Creed 2, for all we know, that PSP game was apart of that deal.

Who is to say this isn't benefiting Nintendo? 

They basically have 48% of the console market all to themselves making games for much less money.  3rd parties, through their actions, have basically created a whole new generation of people strongly devoted to Nintendo.  There are a lot of people out there who own the Wii as their only system and know equate Nintendo with top quality and equate 3rd parties as third rate trash. 

This isn't like Playstation where when 3rd parties bail, they sink--Nintendo games are unique in the industry and are only available on Nintendo platforms. Madden and Need for Speed you can get anywhere.

In the end, third parties only fucked themselves.  Anyone that still doubts this should do a little research on jobs lost this generation compared to every other.

So yeah, Nintendo is doing fine and dandy.  They're sitting on top of the world with a whole new army of people that quickly found out no one in the world makes games as well as they do.  It's 1985 all over again.

Third parties? They're in the alley behind a dive bar sucking dick for beer money.

I don't know about anyone else but I don't want to play (let alone buy) games like FPS, RTS, GT5, Forza, Red dead Redemption, Madden, NFS, MGS4, MW 1&2 or even Pinball  on the Wii.

I wonder just how many  of that 48% wii owners owns also a HD console especially those who like any of the games (genre) I just mention?