So the claim would be, failure to properly market third party releases are what's responsible for their relatively low sales performances? Compared to quality or at least heavily marketed Nintendo titles.

Maybe in regards to some of the quality titles like Okami, Zack & Wiki or No More Heroes, but I'm really not convinced a handful of TV spots would have suddenly catapulted any of those titles into multi-million sellers. Clearly the quality was there.

How many good quality third party games (even original IPs) will have to be released on the platform before publishers start seeing the payoffs one would expect of developing for a "lead" platform?

The internet has given people a new way to express their stupidity and immaturity. That is why there seems to be so much bitching.

One could make the claim as you describe however would likely couldn't prove it in the way you'd believe.  Consider No More Heroes for example.  Now, let's say Suda51 launched a multimillion dollar ad-campaign (let's pretend they had the money for that) which resulted in:  giant cardboard standouts in major retailers, television commercials during prime time, magazine and viral ads galore, and much much more.

Given those, do you believe that the game would still have sold the same amount we see now?  I doubt anyone here would realistically make such a claim.  Advertising would have driven sales.  How much we don't know however.  Better marketing would have definitely helped however in many cases due to other factors, it was simply not possible.

I would also challenge your definition of "payoffs."  Do you think Suda51 is in the poor house now or that they lost money on No More Heroes?  Did the game make them rich?  No.  Did the game meet some reasonable expectations?  Quite likely it did.  There was a payoff there but it was less than I'm sure the developer had hoped for.

Who says you have to be convinced a game would sell? It's developers that need that convincing. If developers just add a little push to marketing, it can help certain games, not multimillion, but certainly better than without. Some would be niche anyway, but what I'm discussing is about genres with wider appeal to traditional gamers. 

His games appeal to a very limited audience for starters. It would not be the best move financially to spend millions on a marketing campaign for an M rated game for the Wii. If they had, it could have ended up losing money in the long run. 

NMH was far more accessible than Killer 7, but even so, it was never intended as a mass market game.

It should have done well enough to ensure we will be seeing another unique game from Suda although it probably won't be another NMH title. Personally, Suda was not happy with the game's reception on the Wii.

http://spong.com/article/14611/Wii_Games_Not_Selling_says_Killer-7_Creator?cb=450 

Zack and Wiki would have been a better example for you to use. That game should have been accessible enough to a large portion of the Wii audience, but it was a sleeper that I'm guessing did not cost Capcom a huge amount to produce.

Tack on extensive marketing campaign costs, and suddenly the investment by the publisher has increased by a sizeable percentage. Do you know if such a campaign would have yielded higher overall profits? Because I'm guessing the accountants at Capcom didn't believe this, and the company heads didn't want to take the additional risk.  

But if you have some sort of hard line of reasoning that says otherwise, maybe you should write a letter to Capcom to convince them.  

I'm siding with the developers and the publishers.

I'm not convinced and apparently, neither are they. Maybe it's the guys in accounting who need to be convinced so that they can recommend more aggressive marketing to the company heads.

But those marketing costs go into the bottom line. If they don't result in significantly better sales (at least enough to offset the additional costs), it means the games lose more money. About the worst disaster for any developer is to hype and market a game at high expense that doesn't perform to expectation (which is driven higher by hype). Dev studios can get shut down over things like this.  

Yet that can happen with HD games as well. It's really stupid to assume that this somehow would be worse on the Wii, without doing any real tests to see if it is so.

If they don't know if there is an audience for that type of game, then do what Capcom did. Port a hit game from the last gen, a hit game, not a moderate to mediocre selling game. Then give a moderate marketing campaign, since porting the game would cost so little.

RE4 sold well, and Capcom is giving the Wii greater support. One of their first new IPs in years is going to the Wii (Spyborgs).

So it's a low risk way to see if there is an audience for traditional games for the Wii. And I repeat, the ports have to be hit games. If Bully sold well, but was not a multimillion seller, it was likely just going to sell well on the Wii. Rockstar should port a GTA game to see how well the Wii owners would take to them.

Most publishers don't want to take big risks with dev projects on the Wii.

Personally, I don't want to see most efforts by third party devs being reduced to ports.

But when edgy titles like NMH underperform, what does that tell publishers about the Wii audience?

Capcom is leading the push in that respect, so I hope no one actually blames Capcom for the relatively low sales of their first original Wii IP because of a failure to properly market the game.

Spyborgs is going to be a very important title in terms of what can be expected from Capcom in the future. I really don't know what to say if it fares no better than Z&W. It would help to know what the budget is for this title, but that's not something open to the public.

All I can say is, if you want the continued support of Capcom on the Wii, buy it if it's a good title. Buy it for your friends too.