I think I'm starting to see why you think the way you do. You're making the assumption that most big budget titles must be multi-platform, or else third parties won't bother making them. I'm assuming this belief comes from seeing the amount of titles that the 360 and PS3 share. And as long as third party developers do, in fact, think like this, the situation will only gradually improve.

The thing is that third party games do not have to be multi-platform to be successful. With the possible exception of Nights: Journey of Dreams, I can't think of any modest-budget Wii-exclusive games that went on to bomb. I can think of a few low budget third party games that have gone on to do quite well. If a developer is willing to get on the Wii bandwagon with a quality game now, before the market gets saturated with quality games, I think they'll do well for themselves. But if all they're doing is porting their titles from another platform, they'll be offering the same experience with dumbed-down graphics and tacked-on motion controls. I don't think I need to point out why most people would avoid that title.

If the rumors are to be believed, many third parties are going to be releaseing Wii-exclusive big budget games by the end of the year. If that happens, and sales prove to be underwhelming, I'll retract my statements here and concede that only certain niches do well on the Wii. But if the Resident Evil games did well on the system despite not taking "a lot of effort to put together", I think it shows that many Wii owners are hungering for some quality games in areas that Nintendo does not cater to. I suppose time will tell.

Oh, and @ HappySquirrel: Nice analogy. Mind if I steal it sometime? 

nice thread!!

see?? 3rd party are selling ok on Wii......... time for Wii haters to think of something more stupid to blame the Wii for........

I sold my cool cause it's not Wii anymore.

Also, stop trying to damage control the facts by marginalizing the Wii's victory in anything and everything sales related.

When someone tells you the Wii has the most 3rd party sales, you should NOT say, "Buts I dun like dem games."

You should say "congratz" and move on, cause your damage control is off topic.

 These comments were funny until people actually started making those claims......

Well first you have to use the definitive Football/Soccer game for each console in such a comparison. For the Wii it would be PES2008, not FIFA. Then you have to take into acount that the Wii version came out after all other FIFA & PES Football/soccer games had been released, meaning N would lose a lot of sales to people who wanted to get a current year game and not wait for an untested, unreviewed Wii entry that would go on to get critical accaim.

So this argument doesn't quite work. It also doesn't work for Madden, but for different reasons. Wii Maddens have been PS2 ports with poorly executed waggle thrown in and a few extra minigames. A developer has to make yearly sports games like these play as well or better than the other consoles before it can be expected to sell as well or compete well. Even then, a game like these would need a year or so to let the word spread that it's good to play this game on the Wii. PES2008 will sell much more on Wii next year than this year. Madden still needs to get it right before it can sell. The 360 had the best play last year, and will probably have the best sales this year again. The Wii version played poorly, why would it sell this year?

And that doesn't mean it couldn't. EA created that problem by serving Wii owners a poor product. I'm not saying the HD issue doesn't hurt the Wii. It does. But poor gameplay is inexcusable on a consoles who's massive sales have come from the change to a next generation style of gameplay. And fun & gameplay is the most important part of a Wii game's success.

Same goes with titles like Nights & Soul Calibur Legends, these are games that control poorly. I WANTED nights to be as good as the Dreamcast version. I bought it, and I regret it. The gameplay is awful. And Soul Caliber Legends is inexcusable as a game period. On any console.

Developers that learn that the Wii's magic is the controls and make games to utilize them will win. Tacked on and poorly executed waggle and games that don't spend the time to make the controls right deserve to fail. When third parties put out quality they can sell some games on the Wii.

I agree with you completely. I preffer when a game is made for Wii exclusively as time and money is spent figuring out how to optimize the game rather than how to downgrade the resolution to 480p from 1080p.

However, when this happens...it doesn't solve the debate thats been going on for a while on VGchartz about wii not selling software as good as ps360 as these games are not available on those platforms. Plus everyone will catgorize the Wii exclusive 3rd party game as "niche" title in a sea of mini games.

I really want to see 3rd parties do well for Wii as I'm tired of seeing nintendo making a fortune. Everyone thinks "poor nintendo"...and that they don't have the resources to compete with the other 2 technically...nintendo is worth 2 times more than Sony' whole electronics division...so TV's, Bluray, PS3... everything. They could have made the wii more powerful and released a normal controller on top of the motion one easily and then the 3rd party companies wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.

This is exactly right (except for the spelling of amount!). Brilliant post. 

 I'll admit I'm also resigned to the myth of third-party failure continuing. Oh well, I guess it just means I won't be giving them our money. As to Nintendo: yeah, they could have used their copious resources to completely blast the competition out of the water hardware-wise. But then they'd have to spend more money than they do now, and instead of having higher earnings than most third-world countries, they could only afford to buy Haiti three times over. We don't want that now, do we? 

@noname2200

Yes...hehe. Hurray for capitalism.

Funny thing is in 2001 Sega and Nintendo were worth around 12 billion dollars each.

Fastforward 7 years later and sega is worth about 4 billion while Nintendo is over 80 billion. Poor Nintendo indeed...

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=173781