Your statement goes a long way towards proving my point.  Why did Rockstar North, one of the industry's premier development houses, coose to make what is basically the same game with HD technology, rather than making GTA IV on the Wii, XBox, PS2, just like they did with GTA3, GTA:VC, GTA:SA (yeah I know they weren't on the Wii)?  Why didn't they make GTA4:Wii and bring a whole bunch of waggle gamplay into the game, instead?

The end result is, it doesn't matter.  They chose to not make a Wii GTA4.  They didn't want to.  Instead they chose to make the same old game (which has been proven fun, time and time again), with a fresh coat of paint, and a new story.  They could have chosen to make a fourth last gen installment, and fiddled with the proven gameplay instead.  But they didn't.  Ponder that for a moment.

Let me get back to the OP topic, and comment on ths at the same time, albeit a little indirectly.

Ponder Madden '10 for a moment.  The design team spent most of the past year working on the new online franchise features, most likely, because it made sense on both the PS3 and 360, given their excellent network support.  In previous years, the HD Maddens have put a lot of effort into improving their animation systems, and their tackling mechanisms, to feel more realistic, and give the "you are really there" feeling a serious boost from previous iterations of non-HD Madden Football.

The Wii Madden does not support these features.  They can't (its not a choice) do realistic animations -- the Wii doesn't have the math-crunching horsepower to animate two football teams realistically with a reasonable framerate. They can't do the new tackling, because again, the Wii doesn't have the horsepower to do the physics simulation necessary.  They can't make the game seem as much like the flashy TV experience you get on a Sunday afternoon -- not even on a SD screen, with the relatively weak Wii GPU (relative to the HDs, I mean).

These are the design teams' attempts at making the game better, when it comes to sports.  They've successfully done it for years, too.  They can't really change the game (but they can add new gameplay features, like online franchise, if the console supports it decently) -- mostly what they can do is make it cooler, make it slicker, make it shiny.

Given the choice of retooling their work of the past 9 years to work on the Wii, much as it did from 2001 to 2005 (remember, they've been there already), and improving the experience overall, bringing what the fans want (the feeling and raw excitement of an american football game, which is largely a spectacle, not just a game)... which do you think any one of the individual developers would choose, given the chance to do so?

I bet they could recycle the most recent edition of XBox (not 360) Madden to work on the Wii.  The only real work required would be to update the roster.  Maybe they could squeeze a couple more minor features in... maybe the characters could have ~35 bones in their animated skeletons, instead of ~30.  Not the near 100 that the HD versions probably have, but it would still be more.  Cheap.. fast.. right up the Wii alley.  Well... not upping the animation bone count, but the roster update should be cheap.

Exciting?  Cool?  Maybe they could keep them from talking to the HD teams, and finding out how much closer to the football experience their games get.  Maybe they aren't football fans... they're just "creative robots" who don't care about football, but instead love to make football fans (who they don't understand, since they don't care about football) happy with new features they've cooked up on their own.

I'm not guessing here.  I know.

If I was forced to work on the Wii, I would leave too.

Lots more interesting stuff to do elsewhere. Let the blind, sightless drones, who work for money, not soul, do the dirty work of bringing the same old crap to the casual consumer in a "refreshing, simple, easy to use" way. I'd go do something interesting instead.

A zillion dollars might change my mind... then after making the zillion dollars, I would leave and.. do something interesting with it, rather than continuing on the dreary path of squeezing every last "creative" drop out of the Wii's now-ancient tech.

Maybe if EA started doing 2D sports games again, the art and programming teams would find themselves "challenged" to make something great, and would be interested.  Maybe if they used punch cards, it might be even more awesome.  Or tradeable sports card games!  I can hear the cash jingling in the casual "sports" consumer's pocket now!  Sports cards, and sports crosswords... the challenges await.  This does have to be done with a budget of $5 and a box of toothpicks, after all.  That won't be easy.  There won't be any sleeping for certain, and that'll be "fun".

Procrastinato said:
Somewhere along the way here you guys lost sight of the fact that I'm talking about developer enthusiasm, and not publisher profiteering, or what the Wii consumer wants.

Re-read my posts with that in mind, if you care to ponder it more.

And yes, Maxwell, I still work in the industry, and as I stated in my personal email to you, Wii work was not lucrative, as a dev, and it was uninspiring -- and that same sentiment is shared far and wide amongst many high-end developers.

I'm not really sure what you were getting at, with the email quoting, but I did note that it was a profoundly unprofessional action which is not appreciated by me, and doesn't do any wonders for VGChartz' reputation, either, as you are acting as a VGC representative whenever you post.