Why is it that other people brag about games like Mushroom Men and King Story?

Most people either attempt to hype every 3rd party effort on the Wii (even what may be crap) or none of it.   I don't really see much in between.

WTF? MAYBE Spore Wii?

Isn't the AC series made by Nintendo?

Maybe a reason they aren't hyped, is because less people buy them. I mean, the Wii DOES have a lot more casuals, and a lot less hardcores. I guess that the total Wii Hardcore /=/ total Ps3 Hardcore /=/ total PC hardcore /=/ 1/2 of X360 hardcore.

This means that if you have GTA IV on the cover of your magazine , you get 3/5 of the potential readers to vulnerate buying it. Same goes for Gears.

If you do Super Mario Galaxy, it is Mario, and other readers buy it too, you might even get close to 3/5, same goes for MKWII and SSBB, and perhaps Zelda.

Now, Animal Crossing Wii is hyped by Wii owners, but they only make 1/5 of the overall potential buyers. For people really to want to buy your magazine, it would have to have awesome graphics, or add something incredible in.

I can think of numerous reasons.

1st off, Microsoft and Sony both fund advertising for 3rd party games, I'm not sure if Nintendo does the same for it's 3rd party titles. Advertising is a pretty big factor in hype.

2nd, As someone mentioned above, great graphics definitely help the hype, humans are very visual creatures and if you can catch they're eye you stand a MUCH better chance of being noticed. Take Zack and Wiki for example. I've heard it was a very challenging game that was fairly deep, before finding this out, I thought it was a game geared for ages 6-13 by simply looking at the cover :/

3rd Someone mentioned Nintendo's advertising strength residing in the fact that you can show people in the living room having fun frantically swinging around and such, but where does that leave the non-multi player games? Before I ever saw what No more hero's was about, I'd seen a video of a guy playing it and nearly crapped myself from laughter, it looked HORRIBLE, he was kinda just waving at random intervals, and doing this really horrid looking spin thing, all I could think of was how in the world a title like this got the hype, I felt bad for Ninty fans that this was the single player epic game they'd been waiting for.

I believe hype is determined by the Publisher and not the console. And publishers historically hype only sure-fire wins. Meaning if the game is a shooter that features aliens and a generic hero we can expect huge hype.

Meanwhile on Wii we get more experimental software and more innovative software from 3rd party devs, such as Zack and Wiki, Trauma Center, and Rayman. These offerings are riskier and they dont get a huge expensive marketing push despite being much better games than "Shoot the Alien 3"

This process is well documented. Look at the PS2 which notoriously hyped games that were mediocre and allowed really great games to fall below the radar, (Okami, ICO, Shadow of the Collosus)

Besides some great multiplatform games(Force, PES, Alone in the Dark), the rest is either japanese and/or I have never heard about it. The situation simply is that there are no really big third-party exclusives that appeal to the western world to generate some hype. (Red Steel perhaps but thats rather embarrassing)

Get over it. There may even be some games that will sell really good because they target a wider more casual audience (like Carnival or Sega Olympics) but its hard to generate "hype" for games like that.

The Wii simply doesn't have the hype driven third party titles that are going to the 360 and PS3. Its the biggest weakness the Wii has right now.

Early clumsy attempts by third party developers on the Wii resulted in dissapointment for many and the perception that the Wii is some sort of enigma to develop for further deturs efforts to develop for it or port games to it. Developers would rather take what they percieve to be the safer risk with the HD consoles where they may only make a much smaller profit but feel they're at least they'd be garanteed a profit.

Another problem may be that developers don't want their games to simply be as successful as Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty 4 on the Wii, they want them to be as successful as Wii Sport and Wii Play so they repeatedly try to play the casual card in greedy hopes of tapping the bulk of the Wii's user base.

In the end its just easier for them to tell themselves its Nintendo's fault and hope that if they put enough pressure on Nintendo, the rethroned king will give in and pay out huge amounts of their freshly earned profits to buy exclusivity. Unfortunately Nintendo is not playing that game anymore and Developers will have to earn their profit on the Wii. No surprise the bidding battles between the PS3 and 360 draw more developers despite the promise of smaller returns in the end.

Developers are in a panic to be honest, everyone had banked on the PS3 being the surefire winner and with Sony usurped they all adopted wreckless strategies to adapt to an uncertain market.

Will things change for Nintendo? Who knows. All we know is that they don't have to. Nintendo has two products which are earning them explosive profits with no slowing down. It is at their luxury whether or not third party developers side with them or not.

If third party developers can't develop for or make a profit off of the Wii, they have no one to blame but themselves. This of course much to the delight of EA who is eager to gobble them up.

http://www.siliconera.com/2008/02/24/monster-lab-not-nintendo-exclusive-gamefly-thinks-so/

http://www.gamefly.com/products/detail.asp?pid=130410

http://www.ebgames.com/product.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1&product_id=281892 

Most of these games like Monster Lab, Deadly Creatures and others just don't sound like anything more than niche titles. I've never understood why people get so excited about these fringe titles comming to the Wii.

Desperation.  Wii fans are starved for quality 3rd party support that doesn't come in the form of PS2 ports or one-off games like Zack and Wiki.