"We Ski", "Game Party", "Carnival Games", "Deca Sports", and "Big Beach Sports".

Successfully games on the wii are copies of successful first party games, share similar names, or are licensed games.

Thats how you make a successful Wii game. Basically if your game does not contain "we", "wii", "party", "games", "sports", or  the name of a kids show in it, there is a good chance it won't sell well on the Wii.

Thats the sad truth. I wish all the million sellers were No More Heroes caliber games, but its just not gonna happen.

And they all did better than thay should have. Sure most did not break a million, but i would bet they all made their developement money back 2 fold.

I read it. I agree with it.

Agreed. CoD:WaW Wii would have sold exponentially more if they'd called it We Shoot or Nazi Games.

You bet your ass it would have. "We Zap Army Men" would be sitting at 10 million right about now.

You're absolutely ignoring the point of this thread which leads me to the conclusion that you didn't read the OP.

OT: You're absolutely right about marketing. Ubisoft has said that games on the Wii/DS cost less to develop and more to advertise because you need to advertise on traditional medias that are more expansive than Internet. It's no wonder that third-parties that don't advertise don't sell on the Wii.

It seems like you're saying that proper marketing is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition. I can mostly get behind that idea, and would add the example of Brain Training in the U.S.: it bombed in the first few months, until NCL twisted NoA's arm and made them advertise it. The result is millions in sales.

But there do seem to be a few games that defy that. Bethesda didn't advertise Oblivions very much, for instance, but it still did great at retail. Corruption saw little marketing power thrown behind it, but it's still gone platinum with ease. RE4: Wii Edition is another example.

However, those titles are all from established series, so the lack of advertising probably wasn't as fatal as it would be to newer games (and including advertising may well have helped them sell even better). But there a few IPs that tell the opposite story. I don't think Smarty Pants was all that well advertised, for instance, and it was a new IP, but it's gone platinum (with change). Game Party became advertised, but only after Midway realized that it already had a hit on its hand for something it knew was shovelware. The original Cooking Mama was also a surprise hit, one that wasn't advertised until after it became mainstream.

But all of those examples seem to be the exception, rather than the rule. In general, you're right that people simply won't buy games that they don't know exist, and the bigger a game's budget the more hellbent the publisher is on letting people know that the game is out.

In fact, we already know that most publishers deliberately allocate about a tenth of a title's projected revenue for marketing purposes. So the more expensive games will get more advertising. And we all know that 360/PS3 games are far more expensive than their Wii counterparts. So is it any surprise which games are marketed more than the other?

Despite all of this, I still do think that the Wii's demographics are different than that of the HD consoles (albeit by nowhere near as much as they had been just a year earlier). And while I laugh when people say that third-party games don't sell because people only buy Nintendo games, I do agree that many third-parties still don't completely grasp the Wii's audience.

I'm not saying traditional titles don't sell on the Wii (we know they do), but stepping back a bit, I'm struck by how the Wii has created several games that have sold far better than they were expected to (Carnival Games, Game Party, the light-gun games, etc.), whereas the HD twins don't seem to have so many happy surprises under their belts.

That is to say, third-parties are occasionally disappointed in their HD titles' sales, but they rarely find a surprise hit on their hands: they know what does and doesn't fly there. They also have Wii flops, mind you, but we've seen several occasions where they unexpectedly found that the Wii audience likes a game that they just shoved out there.

The Wii remains less familiar territory for everyone, including Nintendo to an extent. But I think you're mostly correct when you remind third-parties that "he who has a thing to sell, and goes and whispers in a well, is not so apt to get the dollars, as he who climbs a tree and hollers."

I can't disagree. Probably the most aggressively advertised Wii exclusive(in the US) is Carnival Games and it also happens to the best selling third party Wii exclusive. At the same time; games like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Need for Speed: Undercover; while being arguably mediorce have at least sold 500k due to advertising.

Not to say the same thing that you have but advertising = sales, case and point.

This reasoning is far too simplistic. For starters, it ignores the several titles on the system with good sales that don't fall under any of those categories (you can find quite a few by clicking here). Additionally, it overlooks the fact that copycat games have been the rule for every system (Malstrom's "Birdmen" have been around since the Atari. I'll link you to his article, if you wish to see several examples of this), not just the Wii (for one example, do you think the rush of console FPS's post-Halo was just coincidental?). Finally, and this goes with point #1, you've cherry-picked ALL five of the Wii's top 50 games that follow the rule you've outlined.

Bonus point: it does nothing to explain why some multi-plat games sell better on the system than others. Note that I said "some," not "all" or even "most."

Sorry, but there's far more to it than this.

Bonus point #2: No More Heroes sucked. There, I said it.

The additional cost of mainstream advertising is a fair point, but then as Rol points out most (all?) of the HD systems' best sellers also so that level of marketing (often far more).

It's not a case of "Wii/DS games cost more overall to market." It's more a case of "Wii/DS games cost more relatively to market."

A small point, perhaps, but one I think we should not lose sight of.

Well, unfamiliar names must be introduced to the masses on television most people watch TV everyday but won't spend that much time on the internet.

Oh, and that Nazi Games was a great title. Pity we can't have a Mario and Sonic at the 1936 Olympic Games...