Nope, There is more to the problem than that. If third parties hated Nintendo's attitude, they could have left and developed for the Sega consoles, which died because of the lack of third party support. What happened is Sony went after Nintendo's third party support like Microsoft is going after the third party support of the PS3. Add Sony's aggressiveness in seeking third party support with the cheap cost of CDs and that's  the recipe that killed Nintendo, cartridges were just too expensive and developers made less money back from cartridges sales than for CD sales.

Also people forget that Nintendo was dominating the portable market at this time. Third parties had not trouble supporting the Gameboy in all of it's iterations. There were other portable on the market also. The Wonder Swan was a very good competitor and the Wonder Swan Color caused the life cycle of the gameboy color to end prematurely, it lasted on the market for about two maybe three years. Nintendo had to launch the GBA earlier than planned and third parties were there. When Bandi launched their competitor, the Crystal Swan, it was too late. Third parties did not support it.

Most people think that relationships with the developers is what constitue third party support. No. The video game industry is a business. EA , Square-Enix, and Valve are all companies and they follow the money. Sony has not done any thing to piss off their third party support but that has not stopped them from losing exclusives. Square and Nintendo were close companies untill Square decided to support Sony. Sony and Square became close companies but their closeness did not stop Square from making Final Fantasy XIII a multiplatform release in the West.

Note: The PS2 came out a year earlier than the Gamecube and support DVD 5, which is 4.7 to 4.8 Gigabytes. The Gamecube used mini dvds that could only store 1.5 Gigabytes of data. Storage space cost them third party support again. Developers did not want to make multi-disk games.

Anyway, I could say more but I'm tired.

I don't think its nintendo's fault but rather player's perspective.

General gaming perspective is to buy nintendo console for Nintendo games, and buy one of the others for everything else. I'm at fault because I brought a Wii purely for nintendo's titles and nintendo's titles only.

The reason why MS was viewed as the only viable competitor to Sony was because of the wallet size, in the direction gaming was going, he who had the most money wins, that's the only reason 3rd parties stood behind Microsoft and considered a MS platform to be a competitor to a Sony platform, which they all knew would also be an HD beast.

It's like what Iwata mentioned, Nintendo won't bring downloadable movies to the Wii because they don't compete. Iwata has said that way too many times to count, the point is not to compete, in this case specifically downloadable movies, that job is done by the PS3 very well and as Iwata said, Sony has their own movie studio, and Microsoft has a lot of money.

However in the direction Nintendo has taken, money isn't the major factor it was going to be in the HD direction, that and several other reasons lead to their monopoly level success on first party titles, third parties couldn't have seen it coming unless they were paying to user log ins for yahoo games. Even then he relation probably could only be seen in hindsight.

Shigeru did say he was speaking to third parties about Wii development, and that he noticed they would put their noobies to develop on the Wii and in result the games were horrible and sold horribly. Nintendo's relationship with japanesse third parties was very good by the time of the Game Boy Color, they had working relations with SE and Capcom to my knowledge back then.

If memory serves I remember Sony made a move to buy a large chunk of SE a year before FF7 was released on PSX. ^_^

Being secretive is natural when your company can be wiped out by a lack of creativity combined with a burst of overenthusiastic competition. Unless you want your strategy turned against you before you even bring it to bear, when you're in a position where you can't buy power, you keep quiet about what you're up to until it's too late to stop the disruption you have in mind, let alone jumpstart it without you.

That said, their tight-lipped nature about the Wii only really caught the uncreative developers off guard. The creative ones adapted to it quickly enough, and even looked upon it in favor for simultaneously being cheap to develop for and having better interface options than the usual "6 to 12 buttons + 2 analog sticks" setup. The ones hit hardest by the Wii's success were the ones who were unprepared to deal with the possibility of a market shift. If they do not adapt, that's fine; there are plenty of developers who also fell to that trap when the console market exploded in the mid-1980s.

And funnily enough, the situation is again like the 1980s. The uncreative developers who refuse to adapt and only complain are dying off or going niche, while the ones who are adapting are thankful for the Wii and aren't complaining at all. It's a sink-or-swim market, and always has been. A 20-year period of the same rules is no excuse for getting caught off guard by the very same thing that gave many of these now-floundering developers their first real break.

Firstly, Nintendo wouldn't allow third parties to support the Sega Master System back in the day. It's monopoly power was that high. A court order and a great little system in the Genisis thankfully changed this forever. Nintendo back then was quite simply a bunch of arseholes, who were only too happy to abuse the market power that they had gained.

Secondly, Nintendo had a monopoly in the handheld market until the PSP was released. It was the first real competition that Nintendo faced in that market. Surely you cannot be serious in naming the Wonderswan as legitimate competiton. Developers had little alternative in that market than to develop for the Gameboy as it was the only legitimate product in that market.

Quite simply, the problems that Nintendo have with third parties now are to a large degree derived from their actions early last decade.

I think it's fair to say, though, that the alleged lack of 3rd party support is not hurting Nintendo at all. 3rd party support is not some magic ticket to success and I don't get why it has this reputation as being so important. 1st party comes, well, first. And Nintendo is tops there. If other publishers want to make money on the Wii, it's there to be made.

'Cause I've got a golden ticket! la la la la ... wait what?

You might want to check your history a bit better, Picko. Nintendo had policies that said that developers who jumped ship to competitors could not make games on Nintendo systems; they did not ban these developers from putting games on other systems entirely. If you mean that in effect they banned it because nobody wanted to jump ship from Nintendo, then perhaps you missed the underlying fact that Nintendo was the only hardware manufacturer in town that mattered.

Developers chose not to move over to the Sega Master System out of fear of failure. Success was assured on the NES, but not on the SMS. Nintendo didn't have to lift a finger; a simple "you leave us you can't come back" policy was sufficient. As with a proper market, things sorted themselves out naturally and a perfectly reasonable policy (one which, I might add, developers such as Coleco and Atari tried to enforce as well less than a decade prior) only ensured that competition was minimal.

If you plan to criticize Nintendo for minimizing competition in the 1980s with exclusionary policy, then I suggest you also throw some of that criticism at Microsoft for buying support away from competitors, and at Sony for buying the market at large by offering everything dirt-cheap and taking a loss. These are no more or less egregious offenses than Nintendo's passive policies concerning third-party developers.

Some people in this thread including the OP, and lots outside, still believe that this is a problem for Nintendo. But like with the DS, this is not a problem for Nintendo, this is a problem for 3rd parties.
I guess some people just want to find a crack in Nintendo's armor.
But as time goes, it looks more and more apparent that 3rd parties not supporting Nintendo are bound to failure. Failure can be bankruptcy or losing market share and money.

So secrecy didn't cost Nintendo anything. It's one of their protection, ans Six Axis should be a powerful hint that they did very well to keep secrecy.

Nintendo has changed the industry. The longer people won't admit it, the wronger they will be, with daunting consequences.
As amazing as it looks, Nintendo doesn't need 3rd parties to succeed, so now 3rd parties will have to adapt or die. Nintendo didn't rely one bit on 3rd parties to make the DS and the Wii a success. It's clear some people have a problem understanding that, as they're in denial and are stuck thick in Sony's strategy.
It's amazing that a small company like Nintendo went against an entire industry (with mighty opponents full of money and several time their size) with the Wii, and not only threw them back, but also changed the direction, single-handedly. Have this even been seen before? Perfect plan, geniuses in action.

When I read the OP, or most people in denial, it always give this feeling that Nintendo should babysit the failures that won't support them. It goes off as loser whining.

I think a little exposition on how bad third party consideration was before Nintendo even came onto the scene is in order...

When Atari released the 2600, they had the strictest policies on third parties imaginable. Draconian contracts prevented any third party from turning the 2600 into "their" system with various limitations (most ridiculous of all being that the developers of games had to remain unnamed). When competition emerged, a "you support them you lose us" policy similar to Nintendo's emerged. The competition's response was a borderline-illegal move of making 2600 modules for their systems, and the whole contract system Atari had set up fell apart when a judge declared that legal since you could build your own 2600 with off-the-shelf stock parts.

The short of it is, Nintendo's third-party policies in the NES era were downright pleasant compared to what came before. And that third-party policy only matters when your product cannot stand on its own without it. Even with such stringent limitations, the 2600 and NES both outsold everything else as developers knew that success was assured on the most popular (and first-of-its-kind) system.