This is what I hope becomes the trend.  Instead of the graphics hurdle that developers faced, I think it was more the control hurdle that kept AAA teams from developing for the Wii.  If the Move helps to resolve that hurdle I hope it sells 10's of millions of units!

I'm not sure anyone knows the real reason behind the lackluster 3rd party support, but some of the moves 3rd party developers made on the Wii were just baffling.

Capcom releases Wii-make of RE 4 and it sells over 1 million.  Awesome.  Let's go ahead and support the Wii with an… on-rails offshoot of our popular franchise. (sigh)  Even then, the sucker surpassed 1 million!  Still no RE 5 love.

EA gets us all excited when they announce that the Wii is going to get it's own version of Dead Space and it turns out to be – yup, you guessed it, another rail shooter.  EA then complains that it sold like crap and shuts down nearly all core game development on the Wii.

Activision finally wised up when they saw that a more than one year old port of Modern Warfare sold over a million on the Wii.  Now we are getting Black Ops, and a Wii exclusive Goldeneye.  It's not all bleak, but I'm not sure why it's taken this long to realize that they could fill gaps in the Wii's library.

The Wii has gaps in its library that Nintendo won't fill.  Enter 3rd parties.  Why not craft a GTA game for the Wii?  Guaranteed millions of sales.  Why not a Gran Turismo rip-off?  Bring your God of War type action games to the Wii.  I think more than anything, Wii gamers like games with lots of action.

Like someone stated earlier, we don't know everything that goes on behind the scenes, but these moves seem like no brainers to me.

Who else finds it ironic that given Wii's piss poor decent 3rd party support, it's managed to achieve exclusivity on what is possibly the biggest 3rd party home console exclusive this gen after MGS4? 

@LordTheNightKnight

I wasn't saying that Sony and Microsoft don't have any hits, just not enough to make the environment for third parties quite difficult.

Nintendo still had hits in the NES and SNES years, and third parties STILL had plenty of hits. Street Fighter II was not only Capcom's biggest selling game ever on the SNES (in terms of copies sold, not quarters put in), but it was also a killer app for the system.

So it's still third parties making the games not sell themselves.

No Star Wars Episode 3 is exclusive to just me

As shallow as it sound, I think it boils down to graphics. I read somewhere from Hideo Kojima that the Japanese style of creating graphics for games is to put drawn paper onto the screen, while Western developers start from a graphics engine and build from there.

Could it be that Nintendo does not want to spend the money for a licenses to Crysis-like or Unreal 3 graphics engines, therefore they cannot attract non-Japanese 3rd party support to the extent of the 360 and PS3?

I have yet to see a Wii game rivaling Bad Company 2, Modern Warfare 2, or Red Dead Redemption in realistic graphics, while I have seen the best cartoony graphics possible in games put out almost exclusively for the Wii (minus Borderlands and Crackdown).

Halo 3?

Dragon Quest X

I had a major brain fart and figured Halo was 3rd party. Nevermind that.

Still, Mario & Sonic (technically 3rd party) and probably Just Dance 1 & 2 are all bigger than MGS4.

But Dragon Quest X should be pretty huge (IF it comes this generation).

Also, past experience and sales matter quite a lot for 3rd party developers. EA went into creating Dead Space for the Wii thinking with the Wii's audience it would sell 2 million (twice the amount sold on PS3 or 360 alone). Instead, the latest numbers for Dead Space: Extraction are.... .28 million. 280,000 compared to a 2.27 million between the PS3 and 360.

EA is thinking if Nintendo has the largest audience, then how come our game which was well received and sold really well on the HD systems could not break 300k on the system with supposedly the largest audience?

This is what matters and we will see it happen with Activision and Goldeneye on the Wii. The original Goldeneye sold 8.09 million on the N64 during an era where FPS were solely reserved for PC gamers. Goldeneye on the N64 was the best looking FPS (in my opinion) when I bought it and played it for the N64 shattering all preconceived notions of FPS and consoles.

Source: http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=Goldeneye

As for Goldeneye and the Wii, I will not be surprised (not predicting) if it sells less than 500,000 these holidays. Hell, I have yet to see Goldeneye break the top 30 on VGChartz Preorder charts.

When Goldeneye bombs on the Wii in terms of sales, Activision like EA will blame it on the audience of the Wii who they will think of as fickle, do not have a love for video games outside of Wii Sports and the occasional platformer, therefore we will only develop games on systems who cater to that traditional, dedicated 13-30 male demographic who will buy our games in the millions.

I could be wrong, but the preorder charts for Goldeneye Wii are not giving me any hope.

In these cases, it is not graphics, but how the developer approaches the audience along with their expectation for what the audience of the particular system wants. Companies like EA and Activision are staffed by male developers with plenty of testosterone and the drive to create a realistic, violent game for those their age or a bit younger. Nintendo is all about following the formula from the original Super Mario Bros. on where gameplay and attracting everyone  is what will sell, not graphics or realism.