I would agree with the Demographics argument.

The Wii may have sold over 50 million consoles so far but the buying intent of a decent part of those 50 million console owners is still pretty much unknown ( I'm speaking of those that purchased a Wii because of Wii Fit).

I don't think it has as much to do with the quality of the software offered on the Wii or a title like EA Active woudn't crush The Conduit or Punch Out in term of sales...

Lets face it, the overall game purchase pattern of the Wii owners isn't similar to the one the PS2 owners had last gen.......

Agree with OP, but you have to remember what kind of complete domination the PS2 had in its market, we won't see anything like that again for a long time.
This thread, for me, kinda falls in with the "who here still believes there'll be a major turnaround this gen?" or what the hell it was called.
Trends are mostly set and only minor shifts and changes will occur from here on out.

What I don't understand is how anyone could ever think that almost all third parties would jump ship and shift all their efforts onto a single platform within only a few years (that kinda happened with the PS1 but, again, that was an entirely different form of market domination).

one of the most realistic posts i've ever seen in a nintendo forum. you're earned my respect sir.

Thanks.......I think.

Hope springs eternal for the brand faithful.

Fourth year is a bit late in the generation to see any drastic changes in developer or consumer habits with regard to the types of games being targeted at their respective markets, and the general buying habits of the consumers.

While some were predicting the runaway success of the Wii would result in some sort of mass migration to the platform as the home to the leading edge games, it hasn't happened. And even given a (truncated) 1-2 year lag between planning, development and release, it's not as though the game market is going to see an exposion of third party premiere titles on the Wii that are currently already being released on other platforms.

As many have already pointed out, the difference in hardware capabilities is simply too vast.

As others have pointed out, the demographics for the Wii market are a simply too different from the other console user bases to make a lot of what's popular on the 360 and PS3 sell as well on the Wii.

It won't happen either, but hope springs eternal for the believers.

I'll lay it down for you.

Last Gen

PS2: 1st place with almost every game on it.

Xbox - Distant second place with few exclusives and western dev support.

GCN: 3rd place with very few 3rd party exclusives.

This Gen

Wii: 1st place with a boat load of 3rd party exclusives (but 95% are shovelware games), and has great first party titles.

360: Second place with almost every HD game on it. It has great eastern and western support.

PS3: 3rd place, its Basically staying afloat soley on 1st party games. Has a few 3rd party exclusives.

So as you may already know last gen had a clear cut winner, and that winner was not graphically handicapped to the extent that this gens leader is. This caused the industry to make the 360 the sudo-PS2 of the gen. The PS3 is playing the role of the GCN and Xbox. The Wii is a new beast that breaks the trends that previous gens set.

I miss last gen when there was a clear cut winner. It made things so much simpler.

The rules of the game are different from the PS1/N64 era. The case cannot be applied here

There are many reasons why most of these companies don't give their support

• Theis vision for gamimg requires high specs for the effects, number of objects and polygons, etc. So the wii is against their vision so they won't support it. Understandable
• They developed Wii core games that bombed in sales. But they blame the customer rather than look in them what went wrong (didn't market the game properly, too niche, broken spinoff all over the game, too "casualized" to the point of making it stupid, etc)
• The do just "Casual"/Dumbed down games and they are happy with the cashflow

Wii won't see as much core games as the HD systems from the most known companies. This leaves a chance for the small ones that want to develop console games and see this as their oppotunity. They can study why core games don't sell on Wii and do a proper research instead of assumptions and then they will develop their games properly.... The research takes a lot of time but the games that bomb do for a reason and is not because of the common Wii customer is casual. The real reason is that most developers fail to make the game attractive to the customer

Both of these points are linked.  The reason third parties won't make good money on the Wii is, for a long time, they just kept 'dangling their feet' on the system trying to make low quality games on the system (Soul Calibur Legends, Zack and Wiki, No More Heroes, Madworld) claiming they were 'the best the Wii could do'.  Then cried bloody murder when they didn't sell a million copies and threw up their hands claiming it was pointless to make games for the Wii.

In reality, its their fault that they were making such lackluster games that were clearly low budget and not even 1/5 the effort of a 360 or PS3 title.  If they expected a game to sell as well as a Nintendo product or something on the 360/PS3, they should have put forth the effort and marketing as something on the other systems.

Next time you are in a game store, look at some of the wii games and you will notice all the unknown publishers releasing games for the system.

Ever heard of "DSI Games"(not to be confused the the Nintendo DSI)? What about "Data Design Interactive"? There are a lot more of them.

If I had seen a game with The Conduit's graphical and technical fidelity from Capcom, EA, Ubisoft and others, and then that bombed badly, I'd understand them. But they have yet to try the waters.

That's about to change with Capcom and Monster Hunter 3, but it's unlikely to spread to other companies as well, as stubborn as they are.