I think the problem was that 3rd party dicked Wii owners around after the launch titles.

EA Sports games simplified with cartoonish graphics
On rails shooters
Shovelware

Ontop of that the bias metacritic reviews did not help. i.e being marked lower because gfx were not upto par to 360/ps3 and because controls were not traditional.

So when one did release a decent game everyone dismissed it already.

Yes, absolutely true. You reap what you sow after all.

Shame on you all for buying Mario, Smash Bros. and Zelda games instead of Dead Space Extraction, Conduit and Rayman! No wonder third-parties are abandoning Nintendo!

I never bought my Wii for third parties. I bought it for Nintendo's games.

Third Parties never sell on Nintendo Consoles for a reason.

Maybe if third parties didn't release concentrated excrement pressed into disc form, Wii owners would have bought more third party titles.

Not many Wii U owners are buying 3rd party games...

I did my part, I own 4 3rd party titles of my 6 games.

Third parties actually did pretty well with their sales of Wii software, contrary to popular belief. Mainly due to the cheaper development and publishing costs. Ubisoft, Activision, Sega and Capcom in particular did very well from sales of their Wii games.

Generally a publisher only needs to shift 250K units before starting to make a profit, PS3 and 360 titles you can double that figure at least. Have a look at how many Wii titles from third parties sold over 250K and how few PS3 and 360 titles sold over 500K. The difference is quite staggering the last time I checked it out. And that's titles with a decent budget, shovelware such as Anubis and Ninjabread Man probably netted a profit after 50K or so.

And you've also got to take into account how much cheaper Wii U development is going to be compared to PS4 and 720 development. Developers are getting tens of thousands of pounds worth of licences for free with every devkit. Free use of Greenhill's MULTI IDE, free licences for Autodesk and Havok middleware and free use of the Unity 4 engine. 10 devkits and you're probably saving around 200 grand that you'd have to fork out for when getting hold of 10 x PS4 or 720 devkits. Developers can't transfer their old PS3 and 360 licences they have to purchase new ones every gen.

You really don't need to worry about third party support this gen, you may even see the Wii U being the lead platform for multiplatform titles.

I own Zombi U, NG3:RE, and Tekken Tag 2. So I've done my part.

I was young and biased, didn't know a thing about Metacritic. After all the "misses" I had with all the craptastic games I stuck to Mario or anyone I saw in melee/brawl.

Some exceptions being Okami because I was drawn to its artstyle, or the Harvest moon series (my guilty pleasure).

It isnt our fault, its nintendos. Microsoft and sony went with a similar achitecture and control schemes that made it easier to port between the two. Nintendo went their own way and they benefitted from the approach, but third parties did not. To maximise sells, developers need to get on as many platforms as possible and nintendo was just too different to make it an easy thing for developers to do.

Seems like nintendo will probably be in the same boat again. Hopefully they can get some love soon, but who knows...

While Wii owners did support some of the 3rd party games they did a pretty poor job of supporting anything "Core" outside of Nintendo 1st party.

I'll get some major flack about what Im saying but its the truth. I can't blame 3rd parties for being hesitant about bring their big gun hardcore franchises over to the Wii U user base when theres little evidence theres a market for them there.

Wii U owners will have a major chance to put their money where their mouth is with Bayonetta 2. Its exclusive, isnt a late port, and isnt gimped on features. It's vitally important that game does well.

I expect heavy 3rd party support from Japan however as it appears Nintendo is really focused on that market