I recently bought Call of Duty: World at War for the Wii, and I'm finding it to be a worthwhile offering so far.  Even after hearing about the stripped down multiplayer and the removal of the Nazi Zombies, I felt it important to support quality third party games on the Wii.  However, I realized that I've hit a bit of a conundrum when it comes to the message I want to send.  See, what I want to tell third parties is to stop watering down the Wii version of multiplatform games, which is pretty much standard if there's even a Wii version to begin with, and to start giving it at least as much in the way of development resources as the PS360 versions.  However, I (and the Wii owner base at large) only have two options available: Either buy the game, or don't.  Here's the problem:

If watered down games do sell (i.e. I buy the game, hoping to entice them to start dedicating more resources to Wii development), third parties will interpret it as being good enough to half ass the games they put out for the Wii, and never improve the quality of their work.
If watered down games don't sell (i.e. I don't buy the game, hoping to tell them that I won't support low quality games), third parties will interpret it as the lack of a viable market for them on the Wii, and cut back on development.

I'm sure everyone around here has seen this all-encompassing no-win scenario against the Wii in debates over third party support.  No matter what I do, I can and probably will be misinterpreted in the ways I described.  So the question is this: In voting with my wallet, is there actually a way to make sure the devs get my message of wanting them to start taking the Wii seriously?

This pretty much sums up the problem pretty well. There is a ray of light though, as there are companies that actually seem to be making the effort to put quality work into their games. the simple answer is to support those ones.

Indeed.

Can't have a watered-down Wii port if the game is exclusive. Buy games like Little King's Story, Madworld, and Conduit.

with that being said the quality ones for the wii e.g. NMH or zak and wiki haven't sold amazingly (however people are saying the sales were good enough for the developers).

But I agree with you, it is a no win situation, either we buy watered down crap, or we dont and third parties complain, or studios develop high quality niche games which dont sell amazingly on a large install base

If it's not a wii exclusive, I don't even bother with it, the moment I see that a game is relesed on wii besides HD consoles I know it's probably gonna be a watered down low cost port in an attemp to cover the costs of the main(or HD) versions.
I am willing to give sonic unleashed a chance though.

JINX!!! This is what I was going to say. But I think that while games exclusivity should mean the full effort will be behind it, I feel like Kenny that having the same production on all platiform should be standard.

I was upset that the Wii version of COD was striped of some of it's Multiplayer modes, especially with no clear reason why other then half assed.

...I was tore with buying it, but I'm glad I did cause its fun, but still ticks me off with the reduced modes.

This is true those and Boom Blox for example didn't sell in to the millions, but to me thats cause I wouldn't consider them MAJOR third party exclusives. I often wonder what would the sells of those games be on the other consoles, cause personally I think the sells they have are what they deserve.

Was going to get this game but so pissed off that they gimped the Wii version I just can't bring myself to give them my money. And can't get the 360 version either cause after playing Prime 3 and RE4 Wii I can't really play a shooting game with regular control pad.

Believe me, I have every intention of buying Conduit, and Madworld is definitely on my radar.  Still, these quality exclusives aren't terribly common at the moment, and at this point, I'm getting concerned that third parties are never going to take the Wii seriously, no matter how well it does.

I think things are going to take a big turn for the better in Q1-2 next year. I really hope people support the conduit, madworld, house of the dead Overkill, Demon blade and monster hunter 3. I have a felling the conduit will sell alot , in the range of 2-3 million hopefully. Same with house of the dead and monster hunter 3. Madworld is the only one I see having a little trouble selling a million copies.

If those are big succeses maybe third parties will finally step it up.