Reputation plays a big part.

I'd buy any Nintendo game that looks interesting to me and completely ignore reviews and almost guaranteed I'd enjoy it.

Meanwhile, 3rd party games have been mostly shovelwares or halfassed.

It's easy to guess where my gaming money will go.

Other M wasn't "farmed out", it was co-developed with an external developer.  Nintendo SPD1 (internal) and Team Ninja (external) made the game.  And it was advertised well imo, the problem was more the press backlash stunting upfront sales, due to the (let's face it) crappy story.

The Conduit was C grade game, from a C grade dev, and got (at best) a B grade marketing campaign.  It probably compares well to what Sega did with Golden Axe PS3/360.

I agree Madworld was probably a bit more expensive to make than most guess (due chiefly to the sound imo, tons of voice and licensed music), but I won't beat around the bush, the game was shallow as shit and deserved to bomb.  And honestly, this game would've bombed just as hard if not harder on PS2, PS3 or 360... indeed according to NPD, it even outsold Bayonetta PS3.

And actually, games like Madworld and The Conduit are emblematic of the chief problem 3rd parties have with core games Wii; rather than bring their big core series to Wii, they almost exclusively come in with low budget, low promotion, more experimental offerings or genre divergent spinoffs, and due to the vacuum of legitimate AAA games, these BBB or CCC games get put under a microscope in their place.  I mean, it's like if we went back in time and decided to base the merits of PS2 3rd party core games only on stuff like God Hand or Hunter: The Reckoning.  It makes no sense.

The simple truth with Wii is that, fundamentally, you get out of it exactly what you put into it.  That's why Nintendo's riding high, and almost everyone else is struggling on the system.  If 3rd parties had simply treated Wii like they treated PS2, they'd be looking at a Wii software market like PS2's for core games today.

" If 3rd parties had simply treated Wii like they treated PS2, they'd be looking at a Wii software market like PS2's for core games today."

I'm really not sure I buy this. The Wii has primitive graphics, primitive online, and requires you buy an actual controller separately. I'm not sure how much of the core market it could conceivably have captured with those kinds of handicaps.

Mad World was not that great a game. It was repetitive and short with little replay value plus it was single player with no online. Basically missing key features of big sellers.

PS2 had primitive graphics, primitive online and (like it or not) the Wii remote plus nunchuk is an "actual controller", and is honestly capable of handling most modern genres fine.  All the indications were there early on for a strong core market, especially with games like Red Steel and RE4 far surpassing sales expectations.

Basically, 3rd parties shat the bed with shovelware and spinoffs, and now they're stuck with a super casual mainstream Wii marketplace that they've basically poisoned themselves with, a base that really only trusts Nintendo's brand.

Wii has FAR better graphics and online than PS2. Last gen ps2 was half as powerful as xbox with MUCH worse online and that didn't stop it. They just stole the market share with casual crap (Singstar, Eyetoy) cartoony childrens games (Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank) and watered down ports of awesome Gamecube games (Resident Evil 4) that they couldnt handle with there weak graphics card.

^Not serious. Don't flame me.

more than half the games I buy are made in nintendo (well if you exclude PC of course).

However there are a lot more HS games that I feel like getting when they hit the bargain bin than there are wii games I feel the same about. Nintendo games seldom drop in price, so this is a direct comparison of HD/wii 3rd party.

I still think Nintendo fans put way to much crap on third parties and not enough on Nintendo's part in all of this. I'd go on a rant, but I can't be bothered arguing for 3 pages with three different people about something I don't really care about.

The million sellers on PS360 are almost all simple shooter games, even games that are predicting somethin other are simple shooter in the end (FF13, Alan Wake, Mass Effect . Many people buy these games because of the graphics. It's the same people that went to the cinema to watch transformers.

For ambitious gamer there are good third party core games (like Shattered Memories, Fragile Dreams, de Blob, Okami etc.) but these are no mass market products. The mass market gamer wants his hd-shooter with cool beefy man and woman with big boobs. And you don't get these type of games on the Wii.

I completely agree.