If you add up the # of titles I have seen some people write off as bundled sales, your result would leave you with more Wii's sold than there actually were.

Except it's an almost well known fact that 80% of Wii's sold have all had bundled games ( Wii Sports and to a lesser extent Mario Kart Wii ). No one ( or very few ) actually think that all of the wii's sold have had bundled games with them. Therefore in all fairness we must reduce atleast 80,000,000 of all wii software units sold and that brings it far below the Ps1 ( atleast shipped ). Most other consoles rarely have even half of their total sales as bundles.

WOW that's a lot of information.

That's not true at all. There were loads of bundles for PS3/xbox360 and there's loads of bundles for PS4 and xbone. I've seen bundles with up to 3-4 games on the other consoles lol.

And secondly, Wii sports sold a lot of Wii's, so why discount it? Its sequel that needed an add-on sold 34 million units.

When trying to prove a point, you will always come out as biased....

That said, this was a pretty good read

Nice truckload of info!

I didn't dispute the fact that there were bundles.  What I pointed out is that even after factoring those out, the console still moved over 800 million units of software.  That's still an attach rate of 8 games per console owner on average.

No, I don't disagree that there were certainly many games that were simply poor efforts.

I guess it's difficult to put it concisely what I was trying to say, which is basically that the Wii started out with at least moderate 3rd party support for more traditional big-brand games (NFS, COD, the usual sports franchises, Tomb Raider, Star Wars, etc). But as time went on, that support mostly evaporated due to terrible sales, and there was a pretty sharp dropoff in the 2009ish timeframe.

The existence of the absolutely incredible number of terrible games for the Wii I think muddied the market a bit for the Wii at large. The occasional gems were mostly lost in the shuffle if they weren't big Nintendo published titles. The core Wii/Nintendo IP stuff was usually great to exceptional, but in retrospect I would have preferred to see a library half as large but healthier overall. There aren't simply dozens, but absolutely hundreds of titles clearly of low budget, terrible QA, all trying to cling to the waggle craze. And the EAs/Activisions/Rockstars/etc of the world decided that it wasn't worth their effort to bring their big tentpole releases to the Wii any longer, as sales of their moderate efforts from launch to 08/09ish weren't rewarded with very good sales.

What was the problem? I'm not sure it can be boiled down easily. Was it a chicken and egg paradox? If it was built, would they come? Was the 3rd party support that was only mediocre in 06-08 the reason that many non-casual fans skipped the Wii for anything beyond Nintendo IP stuff in favor of a PS360? Or were the reasons more complex?

I have my opinions, and there are facts, and neither of these are comprehensive enough to explain everything.

It simply bears common sense that a rational human being should acknowledge a number of things with the Wii when judging it in the annals of gaming history.

Most consoles atleast don't start selling with a bundled game and a non-bundled version can be easily found ( unlike the wii which no one could find a non-bundled version of it especially at around mid-way to the end of it's life cycle ). I don't even think back in the Ps1 days they had bundles, just demo disks.

At your second edited-in comment: Yeah right. You honestly believe a game sold a console ( more like a demo, wii resort was miles better ). The add-on sold alot due to the 2008-2009-2010 fad were the wii fit board was considered a "form of exercise"

Sonic sold the genesis, Mario sold the NES (and ROB), Pokémon sold the gameboy, Wii Sports sold the Wii.

And like I said, it's easy to find bundles of up to 4 games with the other consoles. 4 freaking games!