Why bother making the game better? Apparently according to people in this thread the previous NFS Wii games were rubbish and they have sold a few hundred thousand units. Why do this one any different? If the Wii userbase will gladly buy 500,000 units of a terrible game then the userbase deserves to be milked with shoddy ports if you ask me...

So your point is basically:

Third parties betting it all on HD engines and ignoring the fact that they have perfectly fine Gamecube engines for free from last gen is Nintendo's fault, even though Iwata recommended developers to use their Gamecube dev kits to make their first Wii games.

Third parties didn't have to react when the Wii was massivley outselling the other consoles a couple of years ago. The logical thing was to just keep doing what they were doing, even though some, like Eidos or Midway went bankrupt becasue of it. And even though CoD 3 outsold the PS3 version, "the engine wasn't ready" is a valid excuse to not have a CoD 4 or something similar made for Wii.

Games like the one in the OP are completely justified because their counterparts on the HD consoles sell millions and the market for games with effort put in them is relatively unproven on Wii. This apparantly excludes third parties from the responsibility of putting any kind of effort into the games that they make even though decent quality games can easily and cheaply be made on Wii without being pieces of trash.

I don't agree with you.

At this point I don't think it's about easy profit anymore, rather it's an attempt to hurt the Wii's image and at the same cover up for bad business decisions prior to this gen. If EA wanted easy money, they could just go ahead and port the three PS2 Burnout games that were never released on the GC or even re-release an old NfS title. Would be less work (even with some tweaks and upgrades) and of better quality too, improving sales as well as the profit margin.

The thing is, EA did completely bet on the wrong horse before this generation even began. They had nothing in the works for the Wii, except for the obligatory Madden which they were forced to make due to their contract with the NFL. EA has been losing money for years now and there has to be a scapegoat. As I understand it, shareholders have the power to change the top management of a company, if business doesn't go well. So those who are in charge of EA right now, deliberately greenlid games that would deliver them the excuses they needed.

Shareholder: "You are posting losses and I hear you missed the Wii."

EA: "It may look like that at first glance, but we released this and that game and look at the sales: There's no money to be made on the Wii. The games we typically make just don't sell all that well on the Nintendo console. Sales of our sports games and NfS series as well as new IPs like Dead Space by far don't reach the same level as on the HD consoles by Sony and Microsoft which we decided to back up before the start of this generation. This is proof that we made the right decision by focusing on the the PS3 and 360."

I don't think that it's implausible that Ricitiello and Co. would try to save their jobs at EA, even if that meant to burn a few million dollars on games that were set up to flop. Just recently EA blamed their poor results on the lack of sales of their Wii and DS games. Last generation EA wasn't dependent on Nintendo hardware to make profits, so things obviously aren't going too well on Sony and Microsoft systems this generation. But it's just easier to solely blame Nintendo and many people (especially the gaming media) are eager to eat such lines up without giving it any critical thought.

Regarding Wii in HD and milk jobs: doubtful. Hardware in the same ballpark doesn't translate to games of similar quality. If it would, The Orange Box on the PS3 would be as great as everywhere else. Who again ported The Orange Box to the PS3?

I think you've shared this theory with me before and I disagreed with it

The Orange Box was a rushed, one off ginger step bastard child of Valve's work. I don't think there has ever been a port that was worse than that one, but it's easily explainable. The PS3 at the time was selling like ass and sitting at 6 Million WW after a year on sale. Everyone was predicting it wouldn't even make 30 Million... Maybe 20! And the PS3 was being notoriously difficult for developers to make games with. As we can see now though, those problems have been worked past. People have got used to the hardware and for the past 2 Years the majority of ports have been pretty awesome. EA have actually started using the PS3 as the lead platform.

Here's a double standard in play.

NfS Pro Street and Undercover weren't of good quality and still sold more than a million on either HD console. EA's reaction was to assign better development teams to the next two iterations of the series. So why does EA bother to improve the quality of a game that sells more than 3m on the HD consoles combined, but doesn't apply the same strategy to the Wii NfS games which suffer from a similar problem, albeit on a smaller sales scale.

Are you sure about that? Would it make sense to develop a game for the strongest system, and port it down to weaker systems?

From what I heard, Nitro even had complaints about its camera. The camera. In a racing game. Metascore is 69, so I am not sure where you've heard that it is a pretty good game. An improvement over the previous games, maybe. But EA had set the bar so low that that doesn't say much.

"It's not exactly better development teams."

What the hell?! Shift and Hot Pursuit were definitely made by better development teams, one only has to look at the results to see that. Or the track record of the developers. Hot Pursuit was developed by Criterion who have shown time and again that they know how to pull off an arcade racing game (Burnout series).