...or lack therof could have a history. Nintendo has been known to play hardball all the way back to the NES days. The Nintendo 64 didn't exactly please developers with high cartridge costs. This could have lead us to this situation we have now.

You know, this is pretty much common knowledge. But of course you are right.

I wouldnt say that. The situation you explained lead to the GCs lack of 3rd party support. THe Wiis situation is some what different.

Nintendo doesn't want to start bidding wars with the other companies, in terms of paying for support, because they're much bigger, especially Microsoft. So that puts them at a disadvantage very often, although sometimes they make exceptions when their relationship with the developer is really good.

The Wii is a little different because well, it is different. It's a new paradigm developers don't know what to do with. And to this day they don't really understand it. This puts Nintendo at an advantage where Microsoft and Sony also don't get it, but it creates a difficult situation with the third parties.

So no, I don't think their current difficulties are inherited, that was largely over with by the end of the Gamecube days. This one is new.

No, the cartridges had a very limited amount of Space and the returns were higher for optical media than for cartridges. This is what lead to a lack of support for the N64. The Gamecube had more third party support but the mini disk only held 1.5 GB of data while the PS2 and the Xbox used standard DVDs that could hold 4.7 GB of data. Developers had to make too many sacrifices to work with the mini Disk. The Wii on the other hand does not suffer from this. However, developers and publishers bet their money on the Xbox 360 and PS3 believing that this generation would be a battle between Microsoft and Sony. They set their budgets accordingly and this gen has been the result of this belife.

Nintendo didn't really have a choice, they had to use cartridges. By the time they found the proper optical hardware to make the N64 a CD-based console, the Playstation would've been available for a time too long for Nintendo to even fight back.

The only reason they didn't use a CD was because Sony tried to take control of several Nintendo items in a shoddy contract. Both companies originally had a partnership.

Their alienation of yore was because they were playing hardball, but the alienation of today is more because they refuse to play ball at all. Instead of reaching out and dominating devs like they did, now they're not reaching out at all. A laissez-faire attitude towards 3rd party development, which keeps them at odds.

What nintendo provides to Third party developers is a huge audience that can enjoy their products. Nintendo plays it differently from Microsoft and Sony. When the latter two fight for exclusives and perform partnerships or other things to guarantee an exlusive game or content, Nintendo just works to sell as many consoles as possible so third party can have a wide audience to sell their games. Nintendo provides support to developers when asked (High Voltage and Capcom worked with Nintendo).

Nintendo follows the phrase o the movie "Field of Dreams":

-Build it [a huge audience], and they [third party] will come-

While the Wii has lacked developer support in the past, I think the situation has been steadily improving year after year. Some of the biggest third-party games are being made on the wii, like Dragon Quest X, Monster Hunter 3, Red Steel 2 (if you don't think this is a big game you're wrong), Dead Space: Extraction (it's being made by the original Dead Space team) and Samurai Warriors 3.

It is a very real possibility that developer attitudes could have been shaped over the the years in a negative light towards Nintendo.