So, I'm an upmarket gamer, huh?  Sweet.  I still don't really know what that means, but sweet.

NSMB I'm on the fence about. Either way, though, it's not really valuable for the purposes of this discussion since to my knowledge no one else (besides indies) is even trying to compete with Nintendo in the old-school 2D platformer market.

For examples of core games on the Wii - SMG, Zelda, Metroid spring to mind. Such core series as Nintendo actually bothers to iterate upon tend to be of high quality (Other M notwithstanding) and sell fairly to very well. But these aren't the mammoth 10- to 20-million-sellers that put other first party efforts to shame.

How is NSMB not core? It's a 2D sidescrolling platformer of a very old gaming mascot, and a very difficult one at that, especially with multiple players. IMO it's far more "core" than those games pretending to be movies that litter the HD consoles.

I think this is a valuable analysis. But what about a game like MH3? It didn't try to implement any waggly nonsense and by all accounts it was a very good game. But its sales were very bad by the standards of the series and, indeed, pretty bad by the standards of big-name third-party games on the HD twins. And the "Nintendo outcompeted it" explanation doesn't hold water here, for obvious reasons, unless the suggestion is that a several-years-old Zelda game has permanently stifled all desire for action RPGs on the Wii.

We might be able to blame the poor performance of a lot of Wii third-party core games on the fact that they weren't all that good, but even good games seem to underperform.

Lazy and evil third parties!

2D sidescrolling platformers may have been core games back on the SNES, but I'd say that nowadays they are not. And NSMB is one of the easiest games I've ever played.

Lol that doesn't make any sense. How can something be a core game 15 years ago but not now? So essentially what your saying is the definition of a core game is competely relative, which I totally agree with.

Does that also mean many HD "core" games will be considered casual 15 years from now?

Try playing NSMB Wii with four players. Not to mention the secret levels and get all three coins in each level. It's not easy dude, I guarentee it.

Fifteen years from now HD core games might well be considered casual.

Monster Hunter Tri sales were bad by the standards of the series? It's the best selling home console Monster Hunter and the third best selling Monster Hunter title yet. The only region it did poorly in compared to Freedom Unite and Freedom 2 is Japan, and both those titles are portable titles. It may not be a big hit compared to big third party hits on 360 or PS3, but to suggest Tri has performed poorly is a flimsy suggestion at best, and becomes absurd when you suggest it has sold poorly compared to the rest of the series.

Video games in general were almost exclusively a core experience about 3 generations back. There really wasn't an "expanded audience" to speak of.

I'd argue that it was the original Playstation that began the process of expanding the general audience. First console to sell over 100m units? The core video game market didn't expand that much over one generation it's pretty safe to say.

It's not that all those old 8 bit games are now "casual" games (many of those old 8 bit games are as hard core as ever in terms of hair pulling difficulty), they're simply viewed from a different perspective. Nostalgia for those who originally lived them when they were new, and maybe curiousity for those who didn't. They won't spend hours perfecting speed runs to post on YouTube, but they've probably played a lot of the old classics here and there.

Either way, it's still possible to have a game that appeals to both the expanded and core audiences. It's just a delicate balancing act that very few developers are able to do successfully aside from Nintendo.

The biggest problem with third party games on the Wii may simply just be an issue of publishers not wanting to use their A list development teams, or more specifically, spend AAA budgets on core games that the general Wii audience has shown time and time again that they just aren't interested in buying.

The core audience on the Wii (to include those who don't also own a PS3, or 360 or gaming PC) is almost definitely smaller than that on other platforms, so unless a developer can make a title with crossover appeal, they're not likely to see sales figures change dramatically in direct proportion to how much money, time and effort they spend.

Know the market for your product and choose appropriately where you want to sell it. The Halo franchise or GTA franchise simply wouldn't make the same numbers that they do on other platforms if they were "Wii exclusives."