@trestres

What theory? I've never heard of anything like that. Well, since you propably can use this yourself I won't bother listing all the games which have sold more than 300k. From your mega flop-list, of course.

http://vgchartz.com/games/index.php?page=3&results=50&name=&console=X360&keyword=&publisher=&genre=&order=Sales&boxart=Both&showdeleted=&region=All&alphasort=

edit:

Just for anecdotal evidence, there are at least one game that has sold less than 100k according to vgchartz on 360 and still it made profit. This game has pretty nice hd-graphics too. I don't know is it because vgchartz is inaccurate or something. Could be that they are counting pc-version. This information is from my friend who works for the development team. :)

Squilliam your points are all valid, but you are completely ignoring hugely negative quarterly profit reports for 3rd parties and higher developments costs (which of course cause the former). So yeah, it's great that the games average 850k, but when you are STILL in the red, there are some major problems...

The only real flops on the Wii at the moment are Bully, Godfather, Scarface, Tomb Raider Anniversary and Opoona. These are quality titles that failed to generate a healthy profit if any profit at all.

All other games that didn't sell well sold enough to generate a huge profit (Okami for example, sold more than the PS2 version and is still selling) or are not quality titles thus not deserving any sales (Alone in the Dark).

this might be one of the reasons that people seem to think 3rd parties do poorly on the wii. only 24.94 million out of 119.4 million sellers are non nintendo games. and if you takne out games with mario in the title (how many companies outside of N get to use him) it lowers it to 19.5. that hurts 3rd parties, its great for nintendo though

even if wii sports&play are removed it still looks bad with  non nintendo games 24.94 out of 76.28 better bust still not as good as 360 or ps3

on the 360 non ms games make up 68.23 out of 94.9

on the ps3 non sony titles make up 22.37 out of 35.2 million sellers 

*note on numbers this dose not include american numbers for week ot sep 7th 2008 as they have not been added

now this is not nesisarly a bad thing for Nintendo they make lots of money of of hardware and first parties. it just means 3rd parties have a hard time getting attention, and it is easier to get recognision on the other hardware 

@naza true about 3rd party losses, but alot of that is from mergers and intelectual property buys for stuff that wont be out for years, combined with reducuing head count, which helps in the long term but kills in the short term. they are setting up for the future so as long as investors play along no harm no faul. i expect mergers to continue for another 2 years, fallowed by growth of new studios it will be intersting because they could determine where gaming goes until they are bought out

For the 850k figure, much of the profit for those releases won't be seen until the financial reports for this year. This is a marked improvement over the results from Q1 the previous year.

I don't think development costs are the whole story here. To complete the picture you have to take into account Marketing/Testing/Publishing costs. Its been stated previously that the Wii required as much if not more advertising as the HD consoles by an Ubisoft executive due to the "More fragmented userbase"

Theres a reason why people are saying that the "Wii 3rd party games would have sold more had they been advertised more" Its because the marketing costs are hellishly expensive especially when you consider the cost to develop on it. If an HD game costs $15M do develop 5M to test/publish and $10M to market and that brings us to our typical given $30M figure. If a Wii game costs $6M to develop $4M to test/publish and another $10M to market the cost is actually quite similar @ $20M given the similar marketing effort. This is likely why a lot of Wii games don't recieve a significant marketing push, though the same can be said of many of the HD console games.

What so gaming magazines think if they use a more sophisticated word such as inhospitable, then it'll be more appealing to the general idiocy of the public as being true. Come on how many times are these thigns written after something happens, blown out of proportion, and end up worthless. Whether they are saying 3rd party games don't sell or some more well chose words such as inhospitable for 3rd parties, it's still the same waste of web page we keep getting.

I am getting tired of this posts. They are depressing. But anyway..

if you really expect that a 3d party game like Metal Gear solid 4 would sell on wii that's impossible. Those kind of games have old values that the wii and the expanded market (because is not new) doesn't embrace. This kind of 3d parties are bitter because they just realized that the videogame world doesn't turns around them and they like to blame the wii nintendo for that.

More games are coming to wii and they will get better. What's the point on listen to this kind of people that cries because their "next gen" games are failing? That won't change things.

Honestly, this is the last time I ever comment in another "boo hoo 3d party games don't sell because Nintendo hates us" thread. I am really fed up.

Yeah, that's totally why GH3 and RE4 didn't sell on the Wii at all.

Hasn't enough credible research come out which shows that the majority of the current Wii population owned a console last generation? The market research doesn't back up the "expanded market" theories that I've seen.

Here's some titles where the Wii version sold more units. Hostile to 3rd parties indeed...

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Wii: 1.36 Million
360: .79 Million
PS3: .54 Million

Lego Indiana Jones

Wii: .65 Million
360: .43 Million
PS3: .35 Million

Sega SuperStars Tennis

Wii: .60 Million
360: .19 Million
PS3: .10 Million

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Tiger Woods, The Simpsons Game, and many other multiplatform games prove that the Wii can sell software just as well as it's HD cousins. A successful game doesn't have to be defined as a million seller. That's why we give them names such as silver, gold, and platinum.