The Wii U performs on par with the PS3 and 360. Are you really telling me that you think after 6+ years both Sony and MS will only release consoles that are marginally more powerful then their exisiting ones? This is not mental gymnastics. I know how the economy and hardware works

I didn't compare the systems directly. I only compared them as video game consoles, in that all video game consoles follow the same primary rules. In case you missed them, here are some of the big ones:

1. Games sell consoles, not the other way around.

2. A well-made game on weak hardware will always outperform a poorly-made game on great hardware.

3. If you want strong sales immediately from release of a game, you need to advertise it heavily.
3a. Strong lifetime sales are tied to game quality, not advertising. As long as there's awareness that the game exists, word of mouth will do the rest.

4. Strong sales of a game in one genre don't mean strong sales in other genres.

5. Delayed ports will always perform less than they otherwise would have done if available simultaneously.

6. Gamers can tell the difference between a game made with love and a game made to leverage a market. They will always prefer the former.

7. Big franchises begin as small franchises, and new franchises will never have massive day-one sales.
7a. Exception to rule 7 occurs when extensive advertising and hands-on experience is used to drive hype.

8. When a game sells huge in week 1, but then all but disappears, it usually means it's a bad game with strong pre-release hype.

9. The only gimmick is inserting a gameplay or control element into the game purely so that you can note it on the back of the box.
9a. Gimmicks are not necessarily bad, but gamers will tire of the same gimmick applied repeatedly as a gimmick (meaning, without becoming a proper gaming feature).

10. Core gamers form only a small percentage of the market on all consoles. So-called "hardcore" gamers form an even smaller percentage. "Hardcore" gamers number less than a million, worldwide.

I think you're being naive with some of these points. 

GoldenEye on the Wii is a better FPS than a lot of PS3/360 shooters and sold far less. Xenoblade is the best JRPG this generation most likely, but probably wouldn't clock in the top 10 JRPG sales this gen. 

Does this mean Metroid Prime 3 was made with 1/20th of the "love" that Call of Duty is? Because they sure aren't equal in 'preference' from consumers (meaning sales). 

When people are talking about core gamers they are talking about the people who buy and play games like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Halo, Uncharted, etc. The defining characteristics of these games are that they are designed and tailored towards the desires of players who are experienced gamers and perhaps even full on enthusiasts. Now sometimes a 'core' game can become so popular that it transcends these boundaries and is even popular with audiences outside it's intended target market (ie: kids and Kim Kardashian, lol, wanting Call of Duty). 

Nintendo-centric fans tend to rail against the hardcore/core label and don't want it because generally they don't want to acknowledge that there is a rather large base of players that fuel sales of games like CoD/AC/Gears of War/Halo/Uncharted etc. that aren't really interested in Nintendo's own products per se. 

2. This point is shown to be utter shit if we look at Dead Island sales vs many wii titles....
6. Tell that to Treyarch. CoD is possibly one of the most boring, uninspired rehashed games that is medicore at best, yet still makes 10's of millions. 
10. Proof for your claims as your figures are specific?

All your other points have one major flaw. You don't seem to understand the subjective nature of what is a "good" game. Many people will tell you that farmville is a good game. Others say Half Life 2 is a good game. I've been playing games since the early 90's and I think both aren't particuarly good. With this being said let me clarify:

1. Games sell consoles but to different audiences. Wii Fit did not sell to the same audience as BLOPS II.
3a. Subjective and the above. If someone told me about Wii Fit, I couldn't care less. Tell it to a bored housewife though...Nothing to do with quality.
9. What someone thinks is just a back of the box feature another person may truly enjoy. I think the Wiimote is a waste of time. Others enjoy it. I consider it a gimmick as it doesn't add anything beneficial to gaming as a whole, others think it does. 

Still this doesn't change the fact that developing for the Wii U currently is not worth it. With such a small user base that are likely to own an existing ps3 or 360, and with the wii u not offering a vastly  different gaming experience, why develop for it? If the next box is significantly more powerful, then surely the devs will leave the ps3/360/wii u behind and look forward to what the next gen can do?

It's worth noting that all of the relevant points are stated without explicitly stating something that I thought would be obvious: "All else being equal". As such...

2. You're comparing Goldeneye 007 on Wii to FPSes in general on 360 and PS3. It's not quite fair to do that. But if you compare it with Goldeneye 007: Reloaded on 360 and PS3, you'll see what I mean. The 360 and PS3 games didn't make proper use of the hardware, and otherwise was a lacklustre port. The Wii version sold best by a fair margin.

6. Again, "all else being equal". You can't compare sales of Metroid to sales of Call of Duty on a different platform. What you can do is compare, for instance, Carnival Games and Rec Room Games. The first one was an inspired (as in, they saw the Wii and said "what if we did THIS with it?"), while the second one was a game made to leverage the "casual gamer market". One sold almost 4 million copies. The other hasn't even broken 400,000. When it comes to more traditional games, compare Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles with Dead Space: Extraction. Or Resident Evil 4 with Dead Rising: Chop til you Drop. Or Xenoblade Chronicles (currently just under 800,000 sold) with Final Fantasy: Crystal Bearers.

10. The defining property of core gamers is that they buy a lot of games. Hence "core". They're the people that are most profitable for game companies. Indeed, the term "core consumer" is the general equivalent, which applies to other industries. Note the difference between "core gamer" and "core game". Core games are games that are dependable, that sell a lot of copies. Core gamers are gamers who buy a lot of games. Wii Play is a core game. No More Heroes is not. A gamer who buys every CoD that is released for their console, but doesn't buy any other games, is not a core gamer - they're buying maybe 6-7 games in the entire generation.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty, etc, are not "designed for expert gamers". I mean, CoD's online certainly is, but that's a different kettle of fish. The vast majority of people who buy Call of Duty are actually casual gamers. Casual gamers buy a game occasionally, play it, stop playing it, and move on with their lives. They may occasionally invite friends around to play a game, or set up to play against them online, but it's just an occasional thing. They are no different from the bulk of the people who buy games like Just Dance or Carnival Games (although CoD gamers are more likely to be teens or twenties males, whereas Just Dance is likely to be females of that group and Carnival Games is likely to be families). And there's no such thing as a "casual game", by the way - just throwing that out there. Nobody creates a game with the aim being to have people play it once in a while a little bit.

Matzy - it's fascinating that you're so close to actually getting what I'm saying, and yet so far at the same time. As you said, different games sell consoles to different markets. More importantly, making a strong game for a system will create a market for games like it on that system. When Nintendo made Wii Fit, it created a market on the Wii for people who want fitness games. Thus the success of games like Zumba Fitness, EA Sports Active, and My Fitness Coach. The success of Resident Evil 4 set up some market for various horror and similar titles, which benefited Resident Evil Chronicles, House of the Dead, MadWorld, Silent Hill, etc. The success of Guitar Hero III (it sold best on Wii amongst current-gen platforms) set up the market for later Guitar Hero titles (Guitar Hero: World Tour, Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Metallica, Warriors of Rock, Smash Hits, Van Halen... they ALL sold best on Wii)... and once the market was set up, Rock Band also did well (Rock Band started out squandering the opportunity with the first couple of games), with The Beatles: Rock Band, LEGO Rock Band, and Rock Band Country Track Pack all doing best on Wii.

But it's important to actually leverage the market, otherwise it will dry up. Call of Duty 3 set the FPS market up on the Wii. Then nothing else was made for that market for two years, while major titles were released on the other platforms.

You criticise me for claiming to know better than developers and publishers. One of the most common refrains from developers and publishers is "we can't compete against Nintendo in their own market". First, look at the Fitness Market, which by that reasoning should have been dominated by Nintendo so that others couldn't get any sales (rather than upwards of 5 million for third-party titles). Then look at Sonic selling best on Nintendo systems. Meanwhile, look at how third parties have no problem flooding the 360 with FPSes despite Halo, which is certainly no less of a megafranchise than something like Zelda.

And by the way, I find it hilarious that you spent part of your post talking about how quality is subjective, and then point out that Wii Fit's long legs have nothing to do with quality. You seem to be actively trying to refute your own points.

Oh, and what I said about gimmicks has nothing whatsoever to do with what the GAMER thinks of the feature. It's about the motivation for adding it in the first place. "Oh, we're making a game for the 3DS? Better have lots of touch control." "Oh, we're making a game for the Wii, better use motion control even when buttons make more sense." "Hey, we're making a game for the 360, might as well throw some Kinect functionality in there." The functionality isn't being added because the developers felt it made a better game. It's added because the developers want to say things like "Works with Kinect" on the box. The game isn't built around the gimmick, the gimmick is applied to the game simply because they can. And don't make the mistake of thinking that I think there are no Nintendo games that are gimmick-filled other than the tech demo games (like Wii Sports). For instance, the Zelda DS titles used touch, not because it made a better game, but to show off the DS. There was no choice to use the dpad to control Link's movement, even though that would have made sense. I still think they were great games, but they would have been better games if Nintendo hadn't used touch as a gimmick.

While it's true that software drives hardware, it is not 3rd party publishers job to drive hardware adoption for Nintendo. 

Let me explain a publisher's job is to bring software to the audience, that means bringing games to the platforms where there is an audience for the game not creating the audience on a platform where it doesn't exist. It is the platform creators job to build a platform that attracts an audience so that publishers want to bring their games to that platform so the platform holder can then take a cut. And it is not in the publishers best interest to split the audience up on new platforms, in fact it's in the publishers best interest to try and keep the audience on as few platforms as possible. Because each new platform increases costs.

So now you may be trying to formulate the counter arguement of publishers always support new platforms etc. Well that is out of necessity a new platform usually means that consumer focus is going to shift as the marketing push of the platform holder will move on to the new platform, and as seen with current trends in software sales late in a console generation sales tend to slow down due to the huge amount of available software especialy used. And the transition to a new platform will lead to consumers looking for new software for their new platform which allows publisher to sell games to people that would not normally be able to sell to those people which is why you see a lot of new IPs launch at the start of a generation.

Now with the Wii Nintendo failed to convince 3rd parties that there was a market for many their AAA games on the system. And as such publishers largely and gladly avoided the system for many of the top games so they would not have to deal with creating Wii SKUs that were drastically different thanks to the outdated specs and control scheme. And many 3rd parties did support the audience that the Wii had with games like Just Dance etc which were very successful. With the Wii U Nintendo is trying desperately to convince publishers that they can build a market on the system, via publishing deals like for Byonetta 2 etc. But until they prove that market exists (or the third parties that were willing to risk investing in the platform) don't expect wide spread acceptance of the console for 3rd party AAA titles.

MS and Sony will face the same problem but they will have a much easier time of it thanks to being the successors to consoles where 3rd parties were very successful. But it's no sure thing ether Sony lost much of the audience they had built up this generation to MS which forced many more publishers to support both platforms. MS or Sony could fuck up and fail to create an audience that publishers want to access, just like Nintendo did with the N64 from the SNES. Wii U could end up being the dominant platform for the audience for the games that 3rd party publishers make just like the PS1 did back in the day. But it's up to Nintendo to do that not 3rd parties, publishers exist to serve their share holders not Nintendo, and if they don't think that Nintendo can attract an audience that they want to serve then they won't invest in the platform. 

I didn't say it was. The point, there, was that saying "the next Xbox and Playstation will be more powerful, so why support a weaker console" is idiotic. Games sell consoles. Consoles don't sell games.

On the other hand, it is 3rd party publishers' jobs to establish markets on consoles. Nintendo's job is to get the system out there, to create the initial seed. Third parties should then be leveraging that seed, the install base, to sell their games. And the number of people who own the platform and are currently interested in a game is irrelevant - people will buy the system for the game, if the game is good. The game sells the system. The market is created by the game, not the system.

It's a lot like cities and towns. If you don't see why, I'll explain, but it's a little long-winded, and apparently Matzy doesn't like it when you put multiple words together. :P

Did you even bother reading my post? 

People are not going to buy a new system to play games on systems they already own. And if they wanted that type of game enough to buy a platform to play it they would have already brought a platform that has that type of game. When a publisher brings a multiplatform game to a new system it is not to create a new market on that system, it is to access the market that exists on the system. And it's totally up to the platform holder to create and foster that market to create an installbase. It is not in publishers best interest to split the market up ether, they ideally want the market as consentrated as possible like it was on the PS2, they only support multiple platforms because they have to to address the audience on the multiple platforms, 3rd parties would be more than happy to see one of the big three drop out (2 can be good as they can get kickbacks and it keeps licensing costs down) if that means that they had to support less platforms. 

In simple terms, publishers support a platform for the audience it has (or at launch they expect to be) not to make the audience invest in the platform. And in publishers eyes the less platforms they need to support the better.

Also I am not Mazty 

Third parties success on Nintendo's consoles is nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophesy. Those who put in effort have great sales. Those who don't put in the effort don't have great sales.

Firstly, I  fully agree with Aeilyn comments so far.

To put it simply, how well do you think the PS3 would have sold without 3rd party support? Like 25million tops?

3rd party games is what moved Sony's hardware. You here it everyday that VITA would be selling better if it had better games and support from developers. So what makes Nintendo's platform any different? why does Nintendo need to prove itself first? And when they do get good sales aka Wii, 3rd parties release shit games and expect them to sell.

The simple fact is if 3rd parties want their franchises to grow, they need to make the effort to connect with other audiences.