I think that there is some truth to the suggestions that third party publishers use their power to influence the market; and they may have had reasons why they didn’t want the Wii to be (more) successful. In my opinion, the most obvious reason is that before the XBox 360 was even announced most third party publishers invested heavily into the development of HD games; and they had hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work invested into the HD consoles before the Wii even launched.

The Wii’s success creates a couple of distinct problems, first off if they wanted to produce high quality core games for the Wii their best teams have already been fully devoted to HD titles, and there is a corporate-politics problem because the executives who made the decision to ignore the Wii from the start would have to accept their mistake.

But even to iPhone as well? Certainly Apple isn't moneyhatting this sort of thing.

I wouldn't mind so much if they went more for "experimental".

Like, instead of putting a poor imitation of the popular thing on the Wii, they could let their people do some crazy game that is really different from other things.  Maybe it fails, but is it that much worse than the crap a lot of them are trowing at the Wii?  [edit:  And on the other hand maybe it's a success and people give it love and respect, which halfhearted adaptations won't.]

Maybe this is what they are trying to do with the "change the genre" trend you noticed. 

[edit:  P.S.  Holy hell VGChartz is slow.]

Here are my own self-debunked theories:

1. Language Barrier

2. Developer Prowess

3. Publisher Power

Here is how I debunked them:

1. If language is such a barrier than how come Nintendo's main and domestic competitor, Sony, has always been associated with high quality third party games? Language can't be and is most certainly not the barrier.

2. Outside of Blizzard, BioWare, and Rockstar games, very few 3rd party developers have their own financial resources to be picky in terms of what consoles their games will be played on. With Xbox Live and PSN, indie developers are emerging and becoming a threat, albeit a small one, to all industry established developers. Henceforth, 3rd party developers have no sane reason to be picky or fanboys.

3. The power of publishers is routinely and vastly overestimated. We all know who holds the ace cards in the Activision Blizzard partnership. Activision before Blizzard had the Tony Hawk series, which was popular but has since faded into obscurity. With Blizzard, Activision got the World of Warcraft and each Diablo and Starcraft game. If Blizzard had not signed on, Activision would have gone the way of Midway games, where they were a mediocre publisher in the 1990s pumping out cartoon and movie based video games before going belly up before the 2010s.

Same goes for BioWare and EA. BioWare right now has more and better game franchises than Blizzard had in 1999.

As for the real answer to why 3rd party developers do not partner with Nintendo as much as they do the HD systems, I think there are couple of important factors. First, Nintendo had sterling 3rd party support in the SNES era, but went almost exclusively 1st and 2nd party in the N64 and Gamecube era. Developers still remember Nintendo for how Nintendo treated them during the N64 and Gamecube era, which has predisposed them to work with Microsoft and Sony.

Second, Sony from the PS1 engaged and made their success off of 3rd party developers. As a result, this history has them favorably disposed to work with Sony.

Third, Nintendo's dependence on recycling their franchise games for each generation and being able to sell over 5 million on Mario, Zelda and Metroid games has given Nintendo an extreme self confidence to the point where it is Nintendo vs. the world, to the outside observer. Who needs MW 3 if you have Super Mario Galaxy 3, which will cost less and sell comparable numbers?

Fourth, Microsoft itself is not hostile to 3rd parties. Before the Xbox, Microsoft was heavily invovled in PC gaming, thus they were able to create  a reputation hospitable for 3rd party developers to work with once they made the console transition. Microsoft's consoles in many regards are PC games brought to your television.

Finally, I think we are all underestimating how much the majority of 3rd party developers originating in the West has to do with their predisposition to work with Microsoft and Sony. Sony may be Japanese based, but Sony banked the success of the PS1 on quality 3rd party support and got it. All the intanigbles of shared history, common language, gameplay vs. graphics and on are compatible with both Microsoft and Sony, just not Nintendo.At least three of the intangibles need to be present. Nintendo may speak the language but their foucs on gameplay first, graphics second and a lack of shared history is not a benefit to bring to the bargaining table with 3rd party developers.

Actually it is the opposite of what you said that is reality. Nintendo was hard on 3rd parties in the NES and SNES eras. The five games per year rule on 3rd parties was one of the reasons they don't like working with Nintendo, Nintendo of America also censored some games until the ESRB was formed.

During the N64 and GameCube Nintendo had partnered quite a lot with them, with Hudson Soft for the Mario Party series, Kuju Entertainment for Battalion Wars, Sega for F-Zero GX, and this is without including games for handhelds.

I say Nintendo doesn't use their franchises more than any other large publisher. And I have not seen Nintendo manifest this "extreme self-confidence".

Actually Sony wanted as many 3rd party games on the PS1 as possible, they didn't care for quality.

The true, irrational hate comes mostly from Japanese publishers.

Nintendo is putting all of them to shame and that's hurting their honor.

Have it ever occured to you that developers make games that they belive are fun and would love to play them themselves ? When big publisher locks small dev team into making single franchise for years then it usually results with people lacking motivation and downfall of series - best example are the settlers or worms.

It's normal human behaviour that you work best when you like what you do.

Wait... 3rd Partys Exist? i thought it was just a Myth lol

Give me a few more minutes and I'm done  with it!

  Why does it matter if 3rd party support the Wii anymore?  I bought a 360 last year for $99 ( after Walmart giftcard) and this was offered again a few months ago. Why would any core gamer settle with just having a Wii when you could get a 360 so cheap?