I just finished reading the report on Nintendo's half year financial report. In this report Iwata refers to the success of third party titles on the Wii. Infact he goes into details and we learn that third party title's multi-million sellers outnumber first party million sellers. 21 first party titles have reached over a million in sales compared to 43 third party titles.

Nintendo actually brags about this as being a good thing. Am I the only one who sees this as a very bad thing? Nintendo has released fewer AAA+ titles in favor of third parties. Instead of dominating the console as they have in the past Nintendo has backed off to let third parties prosper more now then ever in the past.

Should Nintendo actually be proud that their games aren't selling as well as third party titles? Isn't it sort of ironic that Nintendo's happy to see their own software under performing?

yeah, it's not in Nintendo's interest to slow down 1st party games, but when the pie gets this big 3rd parties will get their share too. 1st party games are a big part of the reason they are able to be profitable with a system that doesn't sell many units.

Those numbers aren't meant to be seen as weakness of Nintendo but as a strength of third party's sales potential on the system.

i reckon its a good thing,

It's a really good thing. It shows that 3rd games are starting to sell better. They need to sell even better still though.

i bet those 21 games is all the ones Nintendo has released on the Wii haha.

Sigh. a few things to point out to you.

Nintendo are not 'slacking off' They have x developers each working a 40 hour week. Each of these developers can produce code of a certain quality in a certain time. They can be rushed to produce worse games better, or given extra time to make better games. If Nintendo are releasing fewer games (which they aren't btw - more on this later) then it is because they are putting more effort into making the games great. Nintendo do not tell their employees to 'work slower' for some bizarre reason about wanting to give 3rd party devs a chance

As for why you beleive that Nintendo are producing fewer games, it's a combination of Nintendo making more games for the DS than before, Nintendo making more games for WW than before, and you only counting game releases if they personally interest you.

Now, the fact is, 21:43 is a very high ratio of 1st party to 3rd party. Calculate it for any other console except the PS3, Dreamcast, N64, GC (btw, if you work out what those consoles have in common you will realise why Nintendo are happy that the ratio is lower than it could be)

Look at the sales chart for this past week and tell me... Mario & Sonic, The Beatles RB, and Fifa 10 are the only respectable third party Wii titles in the top 50 ww and M&S is the only one to put up decent #'s this week. Top put it in a nut shell third party games on Wii are LAME.

It's not about what gamers think of the games. It's that they still sell. That's what matters to third parties most. They still sell on the other systems, but the Wii is not an exception. That is something to be proud of,

i guess it's a good thing that 3rd party devs sell well on Wii, maybe Iwata was just addressing the criticism - that Wii wasn't a good place to publish games for 3rd party devs and that only Nintendo games sell well on Nintendo platforms.