Aside from the massive spectacular flops which are extremely rare its the games you don't hear about which cost Publishers/Developers their money. There are many developers who cannot scale their production efforts to the current production levels required for many HD games and maintain overall game polish/quality. When the production increases from 50 to 150 staff, it takes a complete effort from the producers through to the individual lead artists and programmers to hold a project of such scope together.

Its easier to make a good Wii game (From a production standpoint) than an average HD game, so long as they follow the model of TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST and actually get their game into the hands of their potential customers ASAP rather than wait until 6 months before release to find that everyone hates how they open doors or that the average Wii user doesn't understand many of the tacit game concepts that we take for granted.

I think it is more disappointment. Here the wii fans have the best selling console of this generation, yet they don't seem to be getting the games a best selling console deserves. There is this idea that third parties should move over because the wii has a larger userbase. Unfortunately all the wii gets is shovelware and ports.

Two problems, producing a game for the wii is cheaper than producing one for the HD consoles. Cheaper games also tend to sell fairly well on the Wii. Why would a developer waste time and money to make a great game when a cheap but good game will sell almost just as well?

The second problem is Nintendo software is just too hard to compete with. You are never going to achieve that 5-10 million copies sold success because Nintendo has already put out their games that are getting that success. The third parties game will just be an after thought.

Everyone who owns a wii secretly wishes that Lucasarts would remake Dark Forces and Jedi Knight for the the system. We have all dreamed about awesome light saber battles that aren't glitchy, overly easy, and surrounded by poor designed scenery.

One_touch_KO said:
Yeah but the blockbusters for this entire gen will be only on the Wii:

Wii Sports
Wii Sports Resort

I have to agree with @leo-j here..

Seriously??  Are you looking forward to those titles??  They are just mini games really.

I'm not saying HD gaming is better, but I'm sure many people are looking forward to Resident Evil 5 as I am and many other titles for the X360 or PS3.  The Wii does have Mario Galaxy, but not much else.  Too many remakes and cut-down games on the Wii.  I've heard they were taking the photography part away for Dead Rising on the Wii...

@metalmonstar - :) Well...I'm not saying Dark Forces or Jedi Knight.. damn remakes.. but maybe a jedi game exclusive to the wii with motion controls...  Then again, No More Heroes was pretty good.

The #1 selling system gets the biggest blockbusters.

This gen won't be any different.

 If you have the time, add the top 10 Wii games sales. You will see that they add to more than 50% of the total software sales. Out of this ten, 8 are Nintendo and 1 is Multiplat. How many aren´t minigames? How many aren´t party games?

If you prefer the wii and it´s games, great. It have great titles, but it´s selling because of the top 10 games. People are buying it because of them. The numbers show it. If you are curious take a look by yourself.

The best selling multiplat has 3.8 mln units sold and it´s a party game, GH. Like I said, why concentrate on the wii if they can reap better results on the other two. Of course, the wii will see more titles and will have the largest library this gen, but the majority of the 3rd party will be shovelware. Titles like Fallout and GTA will continue to arrive to the HD consoles.

GTA IV is not on the Wii, therefore, Wii users don't want GTA IV!

Also, a 3rd party game from a former shovelware publisher will determine the success of all 3rd party games.

Gta would sell at least 2mln more units if it were on the wii too. Wii demographics is too wide to just say that "wii owners don´t ´insert name`". And it was an example.

more advanced technology allows for more advanced games.

Watching third party publishers allocate resources is sort of like watching an alcoholic drink themselves to death ...

A lot of third party publishers seem to be looking at the market like there is a wall with snipers between the HD consoles and the Wii, and any game that tried to cross from one side to the other would die a horrible death. While it may be difficult to get people to buy a console for one game, (from what I have seen) getting someone who wouldn't typically play a console to buy a game for it isn't that hard when their household already has the system. What this means is that the potential customer base for most kinds of games is fairly large for all consoles, and focusing all your efforts on producing "Hardcore" games for the HD console and "Casual" games for the Wii only translates to each market being saturated on each console and you have non-optimal sales ... In my opinion this is worse when it comes to the "Hardcore" games because a game that cost $20 Million to produce and only sold 200,000 copies is far more damaging to a company than a game that cost $2 Million to produce and only sold 100,000 copies.

This is probably also a reason why developers are keeping those type of games off the console.

http://vgchartz.com/swlaunch.php?reg1=All&game1=Call+of+Duty%3A+World+at+War+-+PS3&reg2=All&game2=Call+Of+Duty%3A+World+At+War+++-+Wii&reg3=All&game3=Call+of+Duty%3A+World+at+War+-+X360&weeks=10