If you look around these forums, you'll notice A LOT of Wii defenses. All manner of third party titles are jumped on immediately as saviors, when the majority of rational folks can all agree that it's severely lacking behind the competition's. Topics have come up recently showing the Wii's average review scores far below those of the PS3 and 360. Anyone can see why. Only Nintendo has such classics as Alvin and the Chipmunks and Ninjabread Man. How much of this do you think is Nintendo's blame?

So, Nintendo has shovelware on its system, it's a symptom of success, not a disease of shovelware.

Does anyone get the sneaking suspision that Nintendo may not have a quality control department? If the console maker can take a blind eye to whatever is shoveled onto their Wii, how can you expect the third party to up their standards? I know many will say that the time will come and third party will arrive, but it may not. If a third party is not told to meet a certain standard, and sees it's previous efforts of mediocrity raking in bucks, why would they change the gameplan? Does one expensive critically acclaimed project equal to ten low budget cakewalks that somehow still make a good profit?

Sneaking suspicion? It's COMMONLY known Nintendo no longer has a seal of approval for its games. It's a developers console. More importantly, shovelware is good, it increased the choices for gamers. It's not affecting you in any way. Speculating is foolish.

Nintendo will probably approach and possibly pass the PS2 as the world's best selling console, but I fear the library will never equal or even come close to it's predecessor. We are still looking at the same Nintendo console that is known for it's sparse lineup of excellent first party offerings, followed by a sparse selection of mediocre to great third party offerings, followed with the newest phenomenon, a plethora of shovelware.

Honestly, have you seen the 08 lineup for the Wii, or have you been under a rock the past 4 months?

Nintendo themselves have gone on record on who their target audience is, and it doesn't sound like you and me. By opening up the market place, Nintendo set an example of easy games for beginning gamers. It leaves those of us who came before this time to question why we stay with a company that isn't in it for us. Now granted, Nintendo is a business just trying to survive. I don't hate them for their approach. I just don't feel it serves my interests.

WTF are you calling "you and me"? Don't associate me with you, honestly. Lets call up Nintendo and tell them to serve your interests though, cus that's what they're here for.

Does anyone get the nagging feeling inside that the third party situation isn't really getting that much better? Let me step it up a notch. Does anyone get the nagging feeling that the third party offerings will never match up to the 360 and PS3s? Games like Monster Hunter and Fatal Frame are a start, but mostly Japanese sales wise. I don't think many people heard these announcements and thought Nintendo truly pulled anything great from the competition. Shouldn't there have been some screenshots of something down the pipeline from third parties? Something outstanding? I don't need to name games from the competition, but you know who the real developers are developing for.

Besides the contradiction I pointed out earlier, and your obviously incorrect assertion that 3rd party support isn't getting better let me point out, along with the other 50 plus nonshovelware titles available for the Wii in 08:

RockBand

Guitar Hero IV

Call of Duty 5

Iwata: I'll also mention that according to last December's top 100 games data from the NPD Group, Wii titles are outselling Xbox 360 titles, and only five of the 20 Wii titles on the list were created by Nintendo, with the remaining 15 from third-party developers. But even with those numbers there, that isn't the impression you get. It feels like it takes a bit of time for popular perception to catch up to the actual sales figures.

You're the one he's talking about who hasn't caught up with the times, you see?

/thread, really

Capcom is a great example of a third party that is going on record saying they are wary of developing for the Wii. It's not because they aren't making money off of it. They are. They want to know whether they're better off developing light affairs like We Love Golf, offbeat experiments like Zach & Wiki, or straight ports of former fan favorites like Resident Evil 4 and Okami. I bet if you rolled every Capcom team from each Wii game into one, it wouldn't reach the magnitude of the team working on Resident Evil 5, or even Devil May Cry 4. If you think the tides are changing, think again. Even after the Wii's continued success, their only announcement was rearming Bionic Commando for PS3 and 360. It should have been a shoe-in for the Wii with the control set-up. Capcom's not the only guilty party, but I feel they're the most obvious culprit.

What about Monster Hunter 3, which is a huge game in Japan, and has a huge development team, used to be PS3 excluslive, but is now Wii exclusive? What about how Zack and Wiki and in fact all of capcoms games have exceeded capcoms sales expectations? Behind the times again, I see.

I'll add more later. In the meantime, does everyone else have the notion that Nintendo is to blame for this problem? I just have the feeling that the Wii will have a massive victory this generation, but it will be an empty one.

Add more later? This topic is rediculious. Anyone who reads it like a knowledgable opinion obviously knows very little themselves about the goings on inside the industry.

EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Namco, Capcom, they all have more or equal amount of games hitting the Wii, and have all pretty much pledged quality 3rd party support to the system this year, on par with the other 2. There is no doubt 3rd party support is lacking after the first year, it takes time to develop games, but honestly, sir, this post is uninformed, and could have made sense if it were written 6 months ago, but not now, and its silly to consider this "opinion" valid when it contradicts the facts. Anyone wanna debate? The end.