kirby is huge in Japan, Japan is where the Wii needs the most help right now, they need to get a kirby out in Japan asap.

AC and Kirby are two of N's bigger franchises that seem to be most popular in Japan.

Main series pokemon is handheld exclusive.

Anyway, I think that claiming Nintendo has made the games and is just sitting on them for some reason is silly. Nintendo games have legs, so Nintendo might as well release them as soon as they can, and they'll still be having their effect for a long time.

yes sitting on them would be stupid, but taking extra time to make them better becuase you dont need them to sell console yet is not stupid.

think about it, in a year the Wii userbase will be even bigger, and the games they "delayed" will be even better. So more sales.

What sells better, A good game that could have been great with more dev time (think FE: RD, or Maybe Super Paper mario) release on a big userbase, or a great game released on an even bigger userbase.

A console version of Kirby has been in development hell since the GC days. It's was posted as being an '08 title and is again posted for '09. But it was also posted for '07 and '06. IGN did an article on it here:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/936/936176p1.html

Falcon Punch!

@ bigjon - yeah, I was meant to have that as my conclusion but got distracted.

Kirby Wii is no doubt delayed either to make it good, or because the people are working on higher priority games. Not because it's finished but now is not the right time for release

Games are typicly finished well before release. Most of the time companies that can afford to wait will. They wait for more appropriate release times.

Now I know this may sound wierd but, Kirby is a core game and core games can sell any time. Keeping mind that core games selling durring the holidays are people buying games for the core audiance. The core game won't recieve as much a front load sale, but it will contiue to sell to the core gamer over a little longer period of time. Rather than cramming it into 1-2 weeks. Instead it will sell over 3-5 weeks. The expanded audiance games however sell better durring expanded selling periods(like xmas). That way you can get maximum sales.

^ Hence why Wii Fit flopped I suppose.

If a game has enough long lasting appeal to have legs, its sales will be the same whenever you release it

a big part of legs depends on wether or not the game is good enough to people not to trade it in, I have never seen a used MKWII or WIIFit.... I can be sure If every gs had 25 copies of each laying around there legs would be cut out from under them.