Some good points, but a few things here. Firstly, it is not as simple as a basic HD port from PC to 360 to PS3, as there are licensing costs, GPU compatibilities, etc. PC to 360 is fairly easy, as most PC games are Windows games, so Windows games and 360 games can both use the Direct X technology. That said, it takes a different platform to run the GPU on the PS3, thus making the port trickier. Then, of course, you deal with dev kits, if the company doesn't already own them, and of course, licensing costs, which can cost up to $100K  per title. Porting from and to the PS3 is quite its own challenge in itself. Only the art assets stay the same, the codebase needs to change entirely.

It would be reasonable to assume that if a game like No More Heroes can sell over 1m units on the Wii, most M rated games have that potential, Assasin's creed included. There is still a healthy crowd of core gamers that buy Wii games, they just get drowned out in the sales numbers by the amount of casual/part time gamers. There are still over a million people out there that are in the market for M rated Wii games. COD:WaW is a good example of this, as it broke the 1 mil mark, and is on all 3 platforms.

I don't know if these are accurate, but let's assume they are, you still can't say the Wii has more bargain bin prices without mentioning the much lower development costs. 360 sales obviously include a full year extra. And the PS3 and 360 are bundled with 3rd party games where Wii isn't.

Nintendo is by far the most succesful game developer in the world and their games are obviously very competitive on their own platform. Also you want to exclude WiiSports and WiiPlay, which is fine, but they ARE games which people play, which means less potential sales for other games.

So despite all this Wii still sold most 3rd party games last year and a very healthy total overall that is at the very least competitive to 360 and PS3. Mind you: without a lot of the very big franchises.

I mean good third party support. You're telling me the N64 had good third party support? Sales isn't always a determining factor either.

I'm kind confused by what you're saying about No More Heroes. That game didn't sell a million copies (sold 400K). Also No More Heroes was a Wii exclusive which didn't seem to help sales in a big way. If No More Heroes was a 360 exclusive I imagine it would have cleared a million.

World at War is no indication other M rated games will sell a million on the Wii. In fact it tells me the most popular 3rd party games out today won't have outstanding sales on the Wii. If World at War only sold a million on the 360 and PS3 that would have been considered a bomb. But for the Wii it's somehow a great thing.

It seems like the 3rd party games people love are ignored and the 3rd party games that do top charts are surprise hits. Due to that I think future support will be negatively affected for core fans.

The only thing that limits the potential of games is the developers imagination.

I'll post this then:

"NPD data has made clear that, in the calendar year of 2008, Wii was the hardware on which the biggest number of third party software were sold in the U.S."

True, the one thing that makes thigns easy for Wii development is the less detail needed in modeling. Since the poly counts have limits, there's less time needed in object and environment modeling. Not to say that there can't be solid graphics for an SD console, but less time needed than a 360 game. Trying to cram Dead Rising into the Wii is a mixed sentiment, whether it was clever or not worth the effort. They had to cut quite a few corners.

My correction on No More Heroes, I thought I'd read it hit a mil units.

As for World at War selling a million units on the Wii, its not total numbers as it is profit margin. If it cost 10 mil to make for the Wii, and they sold a mil, the default amount the dev gets per copy sold usually sits around $20. So, in essence, they made double the investment into the game. If a game costs $40 mil to make, and sells 3 mil copies, at $20 profit, they have made 1 and a half times their investment. Now you can argue that the end result of this example says that the HD version would still make 20 mil proft to the SD 10 mil profit, but consider that the HD version had to sell 3 times as many units to do that. If it sold twice as much, at 2 mil units, it would only have broke even, with no profit, just a regain of their investment.

Its hard to crunch raw data and assume that the bigger number in sales means everything.