One of the fundimental problems with the industry is that it's inbred. Kids who grew up playing games in the NES - PS1 days are now making today's games. Problem with that is those people want to make the same types of games they grew up with, just bigger and better.

They DO consider games for girls, 'casuals', kids, etc. second rate. They don't want to make them, it's a 'jo' job they do until they can make a 'real' game. That attitude is pervasive from low level programmer to publisher management.

Now while I could pull up lots of industry quotes to support that I can't be bothered too but who are we kidding, with few exceptions (Nintendo) you know what I'm saying is essentially true.

What will happen, in time, is girls and more 'casual players' growing up playing Wii now will be tomorrow's game developers and publishers and then you'll see the market for the other demographics continuing to grow in both size and quality.

There's certainly a market now for someone with enough foresight to start making quality games that appeal to demographics other than the one they themselves represent. Problem is could they even find quality staff who want to make it and publishers to shell out for high end games for a less established market? Probably not. The only way this will likely change in the short term is if 3rd parties start going bankrupt chasing the current 15-35 male demographic and are forced by necessary to pursue new markets.

While that did initially appear to be the case, there is a major problem with Wii for Japanese developers and that's the fact that in Japan their games sell terribly on Wii.  Even AAA games like Tenchu 4 completely bomb on Wii as does most attempts at casual.  Very few games can break the 200k sales point where games are profitable without having to rely on Western sales.  Even Nintendo has released games with very poor results in Japan (Disaster/WarioLand/Captain Rainbow).

Currently a game will sell 10x more if devleoped for the PS2 than the Wii (or release on both).   Meanwhile PS3 and 360 software sales are continuing to improve.   While the high cost of HD may deter 3rd parties in Japan still, with current trends they will need to switch to PS3/360 rather than Wii.

No there not.  Unless your Marvelous, Capcom or SEGA there tending to release...

1- Games that are PS2 port counterparts.

You mean the best selling system of all time? If they don't got a GC engine they'd obviously have a PS2 engine.

2- Games not taking advantage of the systems specs or controls.

I've never seen a game released for the Wii which uses just the buttons and no motion/pointing. Also they don't have to release a game which takes advantage of the specifications, the cost/benifit there isn't quite so obvious as with the HD twins.

3-  Refusing to have main development teams work on them and hand them down to shoehorn developers.

The main development teams make core games generally. If they are better used on the PC/360/PS3 then thats where they'll be used.

4- Purposely advertise the 360 or PS3 version in commercials and slap on the logo after wards.

Perhaps theres a perception that the Wii userbase is difficult to advertise to. An Ubisoft executive came right out and said it. Unless they believe that a large percentage of the Wii userbase will respond to a game of course they won't advertise, advertising Niche games on a system makes no sense.

5- Release games LATER than the other systems release dates.

Music games and Pro Evolution soccer? Thats about all I can think of.

6- Still release games with technical issues.

Join the club, technical issues are a problem with all systems.

7- Giving your Wii release basically zero to none advertisement funding.

Niche games get no advertising. The games which people like to Wax lyrical over are niche games. Theres no doubt about it. Even if selling 500,000 copies makes a lot of money, its still niche on a system with 40 million consoles sold.

You call that trying? Also No More Heroes got a sequal due to its sales and Blue Tounge are very pleased with sales, hey look at that, the third partys that put in effort made a profit,  funny world we live in.

This is true for all systems in Japan not only the Wii.

If you don't have a strong brand name, like Dragon Quest, it is really difficult in the current japanese market to have a hit ( Dragon Quest Sword sold half million copies on brand name alone ).

In recent years only offering for expanded audience ( ie: English Training ) or games with social interaction ( ie: AC WW and MHP ) seems had  stroke the way of success.

The reality is that if you  are a japanese developer and you don't have a strong brand name behind you, you can't rely on japanese market alone ( except if your development cost are really low ).

The Wii however has development cost comparable to PS2 and its sales are exploding at a rate never seen before in Europe and America.

If you want to develop for 360/PS3 you must compete with the western high tech software house who made their bone on PC gaming.

To me Wii and DS are platforms where low/mid developers/publishers hungry for success  try to achieve their limelight.

My point still stands.  Wii is an abatrous for Japanese 3rd party developers making games for the local market.   And yes, PS3/360 is just too damn expensive for too small a userbase.    As far as home consoles go, the only system worth making a game on for them is PS2 (and you can port to Wii for another 10% of sales).

For those developers DS or PSP is the absolute best way to go.   Wii is not a valid option, unless as you say, it's a sure seller anyways and even then it'd probably be more profittable to have made that same game on DS or PSP.

Well your example of Wii third-party AAA title is quite laughable if you ask me ... ( I understand your point of DS/PSP/PS2 however PS2 is declining so if I have started a console project a couple of months ago you had to think where it will be the PS2 market in a couple of years when your game will be released ...)

Oh BTW we'll see what happen with Monster Hunter 3 in 2009.

I would say that Japanese third parties have been even worse than Western third parties when it comes to Wii games and that's the main reason why they didn't see many games selling well. Tenchu 4 is definitely not an AAA game. Besides, there were hardly any games released that you could have expected to perform much better than they actually did.

Nintendo holds about 80 % of the Japanese Wii software market and third parties have to blame themselves. Nintendo held about 80 % of the Japanese DS software market a couple of years ago, nowadays it's around or below 50 %. Take a guess of what happened in the mean time that led to third parties taking a bigger share of the DS software market while total DS software sales increased?

In my opinion it's very probable that third parties can have the same success on the Wii as they are having on the DS, but the first step for them is to improve the quality of the Wii games they are releasing.