i agree with most of your points except:

Myth #3: People only buy first-party titles!

 well, to clarify, with the word "only" in the statement obviously it's not true.  but on a less extreme level, for an uninformed consumer, with the flood of poor games out there, his best bet is pick a brand name he knows.  this is especially true when there's no price difference.  nintendo, more so than any other publisher, gets the benefit of the doubt.  

Very good Post, and it may suprise some people, but I do agree. I espeacially agree with the part that sayd 1st party titles show 3rd parties how to develope for a console. every console has it's little niche" direction they want their games to go for a generation. This time around Ninty wants to go the route of motion sensing, and Sony seems very interested in the whole User created content. Games like Wii fit and Wii sports do this very well for ninty, and games like LBP, and Echo Chrome do this well for Sony. 1st party games are massively important in directing 3rd parties where to point their titles.

@ Sky Render, nice work!

I think a good Zelda clone adventure game would sell more then most third party casual games on Wii at the same level of advertice, so I wonder if publishers/developers thinks before they copy a type of game for Wii.

A casual/showelware game might be cheaper to make, but there is a limit to how much a casual/lshowelware game can sell, unless it's from Nintendo or a somewhat high budget game.

@akuma587

Again, this is an issue of appealing to the Wii demographic. It's radically different on the whole from the demographics of the 360 and PS3. While it does contain elements of those systems' demographics, it contains a much broader one as well which is being catered to by the successful first-party titles at the moment (and by occasional third-party ones like Carnival Games and Raving Rabbids). Series recognition has nothing to do with this newfound success; most of the top sellers on the Wii have Wii in the title, and thus had no series to speak of prior to this.

For a third party to truly sell well on Wii, they will have to produce a game that there is nothing like out there for whatever reason, which appeals to the newer demographic. This is the precedent Nintendo is setting with Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Fit, and the other Wii-series games. It's the same basic precedent-setting method they used 20-some years ago with Super Mario Brothers, which met similar results: imitators and previous-generation games from third parties at first, then studios who "got" it started making the third-party blockbusters, and then the market became third-party-dominated.

No. Rumors, especially those related to the internet and video games, never die. They just get passed on from ignoramus to ignoramus.

That said, not a bad post. Your points are valid, though honestly I'd only heard qualms 5 and 6, and sort of 3, but due to quality, not simply because of being first party. Even so, this was all limited to just Nintendo, largely because Sony and MS lack the depth and bredth of Nintendo's quality franchises.

Myth #7: Nintendo raises the bar too high!

Nice post

Heh. I guess I can't argue that one from the viewpoint of a game developer, fkusumot. Indeed, to a great deal of developers, Nintendo HAS raised the bar too high, just like they did back when they set the precedent with the NES to games which had high production values instead of high intellectual values. PC developers hated the NES because their deep and complex games with poor graphics didn't sell at all, while these "arcade games" like Mega Man were ripping up the charts in their "brainless move-forward-and-shoot mentality".

Here's another myth of first-party software that few seem to realize: first-party software dominance among the best-selling games is the rule on consoles, not the exception. Nintendo is actually in the majority here, even though few seem to realize this. Let me give you some examples:

Genesis/Megadrive: Five of the top ten (actually 5 of the top 8) Genesis titles were published by Sega. The #1 and #2 games (Sonic 2 - 6.03m, Sonic - 4.34m) were both Sega first-party. No other game is even close in sales (next best is Mortal Kombat at 2.67m).

Saturn: The Saturn only had three million sellers, all published by Sega.

Dreamcast: We have six million sellers listed in the VGC database. Five of them were published by Sega.

Playstation: Five of the top ten (and again, actually 5 of the top 8) Playstation titles were Sony first-party: Gran Turismo (#1), Gran Turismo 2 (#3), Crash 2 (#5), Crash 3 (#6), and the original Crash Bandicoot (#8). Even on Sony's original platform, first-party titles dominate the top of the charts.

PS3: There are 14 million sellers on the PS3, and - surprise! - 7 of them are Sony first-party. Four of the top seven are also published by Sony (Motorstorm #2, Resistance #4, Gran Turismo Prologue #6, Uncharted #7).

XBox: Four of the top ten XBox games were published by Microsoft. But it's even more skewed that that: 4 of the top 6 games are from Microsoft. (Halo 2 #1, Halo #2, Fable #4, Project Gotham Racing #6). This is even more impressive given how few games Microsoft actually publishes.

360: Only three of the top ten 360 games are first-party, but 3 of the top 5 are from Microsoft. (Halo 3 #1, Gears of War #3, Forza Motorsport 2 #5). Again, this is more impressive because Microsoft very rarely produces first-party games at all.

What's the one great exception to the rule? The PS2. Only two of the top ten games were from Sony (Gran Turismo 3 and 4), and the platform was dominated by third parties. But it should be clear from the examples that this was highly unusual situation; first-party software usually makes up most of the top games on each platform. This makes perfect sense, since most people buy consoles for the exclusive games on them - which are usually the first-party games. Nintendo is more heavily first-party than other companies, but it's not nearly as dramatic as many seem to think.