I'd love to see someone try to beat metroid prime 3 in half an hour.

Ookaze basically summed up all the fallacies perfectly. Developers have an attitude that just isn't survivable with the success of the Wii. The Wii will be successful whether developers adapt to it or not, and if they don't adapt to it, they may make money in the short run with quick cash in games, but they will ruin their reputation and will be even less successful in the future.
Developers aren't adapting, and they NEED to adapt. That's the whole point of this thread. I'm saying this as much for the developers as I'm saying it for the Wii. If you're trying to make excuses for the developers and pretend the Wii is just a cheap toy that only has waggle, sorry, but you are wrong. You're only contributing to the problem by encouraging the developers and fooling them into thinking they'll somehow survive by making half-assed games.
It's not like you're going to buy any of those half-assed games, so what possible justification for it can you have to support their production of half-assed games?

Fair enough, but many of those games weren't pushing the PS2. As you said, some were ports (and in opinion, there's a lot of shovelware on that list). If I wanted to list the general list of games on the Wii, I could, but it doesn't prove my point. I don't think I'd call THPS3 a game that really pushed the hardware on PS2. To clarify, look at God of War on the PS2. It can be argued that it is one of the most advanced games on the PS2. This game didn't release until the PS2's 4th's year.

The point is, it takes time to unlock a system's full potential. Writing it off in a year and a half since launch is absurd. Many high quality games take 2-4 years to develop. That means that there are many games on the Wii and PS3 that started development before the system was even released and its ability realized. For example, if Capcom saw the success of the Wii and wanted to revamp RE5 for the system, it wouldn't be seen at this point until at least late 2009, likely later.

In the end, the point is, play the games that are good, rent the ones you're not sure about, and don't pay attention to game reviews, since there's as much bias in them as there is in the Clinton-Obama debates.

But you don't have evidence for that. You just used bigger sentences to state something unproven. There is no incentive to make the cheapest Wii games possible, except for Ubisoft being cheap when it comes to the Wii.

Oh, and there is an incentive to make big budget games for the Wii: a big budget game from Ubisoft themselves was a hit game. So what if it was a launch title? Is there a glut of high quality FPS on the Wii since then? There isn't, so if Ubisoft made Red Steel 2, even if the spent less money on it, with tighter controls, and more satisfying gameplay, and marketed it (because Ubisoft admitted even casual games need marketing to sell), it would have just as much chance of being a hit as an HD game.

They just don't want to bother. The audience is there (you think Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 sold solely because of Nintendo fanboys?), they just don't want to see it. 

picko said: " The other reason why the Wii does not receive quality third party software is incentives. There is little incentive for developers to make quality software on the Wii. Whilst it would be difficult to get numbers on this I would imagine that Wii gamers are inelastic to game budget (with budget as a proxy for quality), that is you can make cheap games without losing a significant amount of sales and you don't gain a significant amount of sales by increasing budget. Therefore why spend more on a game?"

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What an odd point of view, which very much is the polar opposite of what is actually happening. Much of the crowd buying Wii's are not parents in low income families, but the upper echelon who see it as the "trendy" system, the system that people are impressed they have, the ever elusive Wii. You won't see Muffy and Buffy having company over and after discussing their stock shares, they say "oh, we just got a PS3/XB360. Care to try it?" but you will see these people egging their company to try a game of bowling, etc. Of course, these people likely aren't going out to buy a Resident Evil game, unless they have gamer roots.

Yet, back on your statement. Wii development costs a LOT less to make a AAA title than it does for the HD systems, which means a quicker profit point. Combine that with the dominating marketshare for the Wii, and you have a system that you can put a big game on and turn a profit with better success. Publishers like buffers, and the buffer is the market share numbers. To drive the point home the Wii has double the market share of the PS3. This means that even if every PS3 owner buys a copy of a game, it only equates to half of the Wii owners.

So in the end, it is less profitable to make a AAA game for the HD consoles. The other issue is competition. Since the HD consoles focus heavily on graphics, there is a higher potential for the gameplay to suffer. THis isn't always true, but some games go so far out of their way to bring a good visual experience, they forget they're making a game. So unless that HD system game is top notch and is well-received, it might get ignored over a better game. On the Wii, as long as the controls are done well and gameplay well done, it's easier to get a game noticed (with proper advertising of course).

So the incentive to develop AAA games on the Wii is high, because the game can shine through the lackluster games easily.

AND WE HAVE A WINNER!

Congratulations, bardic verse, now that you accurately stated, pretty much inarguably the most obvious reason that developers should be putting in about 10x the effort they are now, what are you going to do next? 

There is a difference between opinion (a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter[neutral]) and conjecture (inference from defective or presumptive evidence [negative, used with abhorrence]).

Never before a winning console was so absolutely and shamefully inferior to its rivals.What can third party developers do?They cant port their advanced games to the system unless they horribly mutilate them,investing millions in creating engines for the Wii that maybe will allow to get a 5% more of the system isnt a good rentability decision (the hardware of the machine is already maxed out due to it being basically the Cube one with some more mhz) ,and the top developers ,the guys with real talent out there dont want to dumb down their work and take a step back going to the tools/IA/libraries and everything that they did 4-5 years ago.

Ummm.. I'm going to Disney World? ;)

Actually, once the PC version of our FPS is done, we'd like to investigate what it would take to get it on WiiWare.... and none of this random waggle crap. We want to implement 1:1 movement like how the bat works in Wii Sports baseball.  I'd been recently working out how to get a large game to fit onto WiiWare, due to space limitations. This is off topic of your original post, but I had an idea yesterday, to have all the game levels on the network, and you download each level per session. If the contents of the level are only say 20 MB big, it should take a fairly short amount of time to download. If you purchase add on levels, your purchases stay tracked on the server sort of like how iTunes remembers which songs you bought if your hd gets wiped out. Thoughts on that?

I think that developers would ruin their reputation turning to the Wii and developing primarily for it.As long as some others keep pushing forward the graphics/engine/IA technology those that take a step back to the Wii/PS2/Cube/Xbox technology will be left behind.Theres a learning curve in technology after all.They cant just forget about this ,and they cant port the demanding titles to the Wii ...what can they do?

 And you are mixing up reputation with sales.Developers who stick to PS3 and 360 and PC and come up with great titles will keep their reputation.And they dont neccesarily NEED to adapt.Theres enough of a market in PS360 and PC to survive the casual onslaught without surrendering.Smart people ,as Ubisoft ,are taking the clever approach ....give its AAA titles to the great machines and then squeeze out the money out of the Nintendo saps with some name-only cheap spin-offs and kiddie franchises as Petz and Catz and Imaginez Babyz.And its working.Their AAA games (AC ,RSV2) sells great on PS360 and PC and their casual things sell great on the DS and Wii.Why should they change?

 You missed in the entire point of my post. None of your post addresses it.

 The crux of my argument was this: Wii owners appear be demand inelastic (less responsive) to changes in the quality of a game. That is you can decrease quality without losing a significant amount of copies sold. Therefore it is profitable to decrease quality to some point where the costs equal the benefits of doing so. This position appears to be lower than it is for 360 and PS3 owners, therefore on average you can expect lower quality games. More to the point developers appear to know this.

That analysis far better fits the facts of what Ubisoft and other developers are doing. In fact it fits the facts rather perfectly, which isn't all that surprising given that it's a rational reaction to the incentives of the marketplace. To believe otherwise, you have sit there and try to justify why companies would deliberately forego profitable opportunities and whilst some companies are undoubtedly poorly run the Wii's poor third party situation is practically universal so something other than stupidity is taking place and there is a strong possibility that the previous paragraph explains what it is.