I agree most of the install base wasn't core gaming audience. The big problem however was that even if developers wanted to port to Wii, the power gap was simply to big to do a simple port.

It's understandable that Nintendo wanted to keep the Wii affordable, but after it's early succes Nintendo was on cloud 9 and forgot to look at the future. They could have easily released an Wii HD in 2008/2009 at Wii's high point aside the affordable Wii. It would have hade big support because of the recent Wii succes and developers could have easily ported any ps3/x360 game to the platform.

Third party sales on the Wii start to fizzle out after about 2009, people got tired with the shovelware, but shovelware type games are the types of experiences the controller was good for, so it set up a conundrum.

Red Steel 2 was a (far) better game than Red Steel 1, yet it sold less for example.

There were definite tell tale signs by about 2009/2010 that there were cracks forming in the Wii craze.

There were third party hits for the Wii after 2009 but it's not the type of things Nintendo fans like to play up, it was stuff like Zumba Fitness, Just Dance, uDraw, etc. were all decent sized hits. That's what the Wii did well with. 

It never really did well with the hardcore type traditional game experiences though, why would someone purchase a Wii for that experience when the Playstation 3 or XBox 360 were 100% tailored to that experience and had far better graphics? There's no incentive to get a Wii for that type of game. 

Waggle wasn't some big selling point for hardcore games, even with things like Move ... "yeah I'm totally buying the new Killzone game because it has Move support!" ... said no core gamer ... ever. 

Bolded; where's the proof that they did, or rather would? This is an ancient formula from Wii fans that is hard to both prove and disprove but what little data there is suggest that Wii owners in general were not very fond of traditional 3rd party games (which was always the developers fault, it was not due to the fact that no high tier rendering effects could be applied, different generation shaders, single-thread PPC coding, lowering resolutions across the board, shrinking textures and adjusting to a fraction of the memory had any say in games' quality).
I don't understand why anyone is still having this discussion, on any side of it.

We cannot deny that the vast majority of the Wii's installed base were likely casual since about 80% of it will be gone in the 8th gen; it's not like they're going for the other consoles either or handhelds (which is clear looking at sales figures alone). This whole "Wii owners would have bought huge amounts of 3rd party AAA games if they had been good enough" simply doesn't hold either, there is very little data to support this claim.

The DS and PSP both have atrocious attach rates, which suggests that developers were not tumbling over one another to release games on these platforms, and in the DS' case there are also 18 out of 20 games in the top 20 being Nintendo developed and/or published, making it even more skewed than the Wii. DS and PSP did not have massive support, by any stretch of the imagination.

Well how was COD4MW and Blops on Wii? I honestly have no idea but wouldn't that be telling if it's true or not that the major AAA multiplats could scale down to the Wii okay? Or is it deeper, no hdd space for dlc?

for the amount of systems it sold, the numbers weren't that good. re, dead space, scarface, manhunt, bully were busts. u couldn't multiplatform for the system. they didn't move enough units to develop specifically for the system. thats what it comes down to. the madden #s on all systems were disappointing.

The Wii sealed Vita's fate with the success of Monster Hunter 3.

And some of the best games of last Gen (critically and commercially) are on Wii. Wii did arguably more good than PS360.

Name 5 great Wii games that aren't Nintendo published. Go ahead, we'll wait.

COD3 was a launch title and controlled so much better than Red Steel did. For those who wanted an early taste of what the Wii could do for FPS, it was great.

30 million units of mario kart and 20 million of wii fit is not a "dust collector" like some assholes portray.

The Wii did plenty of third party support ...

Zumba Fitness, EA Active, Guitar Hero, Just Dance, etc.

You can't champion a console that's mainly a casual platform and then get upset that the majority of the games were casual-centric.

The Wii was never an alternative for games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto or things of that nature. Those games always sold better on the XBox/Playstation brands and the experience of those types of games would always have to be massively compromised on the Wii because Nintendo decided to recycle the GameCube chipset.

Wii got what it deserved in terms of support. If Nintendo wanted the core third party titles, they should have made a proper HD system, they didn't.

They had a good thing for a few years, and it fizzled out, as fads do. That's all that happened.

Even Nintendo didn't have any real great success with "traditional" games on the Wii outside of the Mario branded games in general on the Wii. Metroid Prime 3, Sin & Punishment, Xenoblade, Punch-Out!, Excitebots, Zelda: Skyward Sword ... none of these games were blockbuster hits despite having a massive userbase to sell to, in fact a lot of these types of games really didn't sell any better than they would have on the GameCube. It's basically just DKC, Smash, and TP that did quite well on Wii, and then Mario games, and that's basically it.