Yeah its amazing that even after all this years, this debunked myth of "most Wii owners only bought it for Wii Sports then never touched it again" keeps getting carted out despite the attach rate not supporting it.

As DarthMetalliCube said, it comes back to a lot of gamers being either unable to unwilling to accept the Wii's victory and looking for excuses to downplay/discount it.

This is a very insightful and on point comment, thank you.  

People sometimes forget that prior to the Wii, and especially in the NES and Super NES era, Nintendo had systems that were every bit as powerful and capable as the competition.  That all changed with the N64, after which every single Nintendo console had some odd limitation.  With the N64, it was cartridge based when others were moving to discs (this decision was understandable at the time because Nintendo wanted to avoid load times).  With the GameCube, however, Nintendo went with their own proprietary disc instead of DVD because they were afraid of piracy.  It was one of the most moronic decisions in video game & entertainment history, as Nintendo lost many millions in unit sales to customers who wanted a machine to play DVDS and avoided the GameCube.  Fewer 3rd party games came to the platform, and we all lost because of this decision.  I am still bothered by it today, not just because it was arrogant towards customers, but also because it was so stupid and predictably so.

I liked the Wii, but I can understand why people didn't like it.  One quirk with the gaming industry is that for a long time it focused mostly on teenage and young adult males.  In Generation 6 there were four consoles: PS2, XBox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast and all of them were targeted at teenage and young adult males.  Then the Wii comes along and makes games for everyone else: females, young kids, parents, etc....  It can be especially frustrating when your favorite company starts making games for a completely different type of gamer.

I had this same experience myself, but not with the Wii.  For me, the N64 was when Nintendo went in a completely different direction (from the NES and SNES style of games).  I did not like 3D action games then, and I still don't for the most part.  I can still find games I like such as RPGs or Strategy games, but I am still kind of pissed that 2D action games are not a big deal anymore.  So I would imagine this is how N64/Gamecube fans feel toward the motion control games on the Wii.

The Xbox could play DVDs, but that didn't sell much more than the GC either.

I loved my Wii! I had a lot of games for it. Never bought shovelware yet never got tired of it. It had great games and I had lots of fun with it. I also got a PS3 around that time so maybe that prevented me to feel the droughts some people had.

The only problem I had with the is how it was mishandled towards the end of its lifecycle.

You seem to be very focused on the physical media. N64 was the beast of its generation power-wise, and Gamecube was sandwiched in between PS2 and XBOX power-wise.

The Wii was the first time Nintendo didn't compete on the power of the system. And this is why I think some people like to look back on it with hate. Well that is half of it. The other half of it is that the third parties that did bring games to the Wii often had like C-teams working on it and often times they just tacked on some not very well thought out motion controls. It had a brilliant and revolutionary control scheme and most third parties just didn't try very hard, which brought lots of shovelware. So that plus that it was the first time an console was brought to market that didn't try to compete on power specs with the other systems is why people tend to hate it.

As for me, Wii was pretty brilliant. The games that did motion controls well make you never want to use a normal controller again to play those types of games. And there were amazing games that had more standard control schemes as well.

I would say it is and always has been a misunderstood console. It received massive mania in sales for a few years but then died out as most companies just threw shovelware on it and so people lost interest and then the PS360 twins finally dropped in price enough to actually be affordable. But the fact remains that it introduced a fantastic new way to play games which thankfully still lives on in the Switch, it had some very memorable and fantastic games, and while the online did suck compared to the competition it was the first time you could play nintendo games online which was pretty cool and it introduced the Virtual Console as well which is pretty amazing. I'll always have lots of fond memories of playing the Wii. Back in the Fall I was at someone's place and saw they had a Wii and oh man brought it all back, really wanted to play some! Would LOVE to see a compilation of Nintendo's Wii games come out on the Switch!

Not really. The wii would have never sold that well if sony didn't fumble the PS3. Nintendo didn't come close to beating the PS1, PS2 or PS4 when sony was on point. Nintendo happened to be there with a cheap console that was marketed towards casuals that took advantage of the gap in competition.

The Wii had many reasons for success and subsequent drop off.  Sony had absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to do with it in any capacity.  

Because it beated PlayStation.

It had poor 3rd party support, it had insanely expensive controllers and accessories and the software almost never went down in price. The Wii-mote was not a very good controller for traditional gaming at all, its online was really, really basic and far below that of the competition, it had tiny storage and next to no multimedia capabilities. In addition, it made Nintendo themselves sit on their heels and become lazy and decadent and led to them aiding in an unprecedented sales drop over a short period of time.

There were, and still are, a lot of reasons not to be infatuated in, or even impressed by, the Wii. As a sales phenomenon, no one can deny its power, but as an actual product, it had lots of weaknesses, especially for gamers.