There's your problem - and your solution.

Appealing to demographics as they are now is not tenable because the demographics simply aren't there. In order to make these efforts on the Wii profitable, you have to work to expand y our demographic on the hardware, which is to say you need to bring in people who would otherwise buy HD consoles and convince them that buying a Wii would get them roughly the same experience (plus Nintendo).

You see where I'm going with this.

The only way to get comparable numbers - and comparable money - on the Wii would be to release a deluge of these games on the Wii, completely changing the face of its library as it's understood by the hardcore. Third parties would need to appeal to new buyers, not current ones, and by sheer force of content force the many potential buyers of the Wii to go "Hot damn! I can get Mario and Assassin's Creed? Sign me up!"

But yes, you see the problem: it is a catch-22. They can't take the risk of that investment. The demographic split was set in stone sometime in 2007 when it became clear that third parties had missed the Wii train, so they have essentially shut themselves out from being able to bring some of their own audiences to that console.

No, that would be textures and polygon modeling. The Wii doesn't magically make mo-cap or animation design cheaper and I've never heard anybody suggest that it does until you just now.

Capcom also recycled a ton of animations from RE4 into RE5. Can we call RE5 a PS2 port?

There's your problem - and your solution.

Appealing to demographics as they are now is not tenable because the demographics simply aren't there. In order to make these efforts on the Wii profitable, you have to work to expand your demographic on the hardware, which is to say you need to bring in people who would otherwise buy HD consoles and convince them that buying a Wii would get them roughly the same experience (plus Nintendo).

You see where I'm going with this.

The only way to get comparable numbers - and comparable money - on the Wii would be to release a deluge of these games on the Wii, completely changing the face of its library as it's understood by the hardcore. Third parties would need to appeal to new buyers, not current ones, and by sheer force of content force the many potential buyers of the Wii to go "Hot damn! I can get Mario and Assassin's Creed? Sign me up!"

But yes, you see the problem: it is a catch-22. They can't take the risk of that investment. The demographic split was set in stone sometime in 2007 when it became clear that third parties had missed the Wii train, so they have essentially shut themselves out from being able to bring some of their own audiences to that console.

Here's where your solution goes off track.

The Wii was predicted to be the "loser" of the current gen, before it even launched.  The 3rd party publishers not only listened to those predictions, but also they needed to develop titles for the first entry in this gen -- namely the X360, which, and not coincidentally, is extremely similar to the PS3, in terms of overall capability.  On top of that, there is *no* evidence that supports the "if they built it, they would have come" hypothesis.  The truth of the matter is that the Wii is successful because it appeals to the blue ocean, and it appeals to the blue ocean because its simple, and was once cheap, relative to its HD competition.

If you look at the history of PC gaming, you'll note that PC games have rarely released with a "low end" PC spec of the day -- inevitably they play best on the finest machine available, because game designs are always, always, always too big for the hardware.  Game designers, often being very non-techincal, very it extremely difficult to work within technical limitations, and so its natural for them to want to create game experiences on the hardware that gives them the most freedom -- in this case, that means not the Wii.  They have the mindset of the typical gamer (as they are usually devoted gamers), and the devoted gamer gets the hardware that will best suit his/her gaming needs.

The Wii never had a chance to win over the HD demographics.  It doesn't have the specs to do so, plain and simple.  No matter how hard the publishers could have chosen to push in that direction (and honestly their stockholders would never let them push very hard, given all the "Wii will fail" warnings), the demographics would have pushed back, eventually forcing the 3rd parties to develop HD games.

My solution is for the here and now, not the "what if?"  Here and now, publishers might be able to afford to make semi-casual, semi-hardcore quality games on the Wii, like Wild Tangent's Fate, for example, which would probably do very well on the Wii.  If they can break ground, by converting blue-ocean gamers to "slightly hardcore" gamers, with games like Fate, then they can move on with games like Torchlight (which is awesome, btw -- I totally recommend it for anyone who likes dungeon crawlers), and eventually carve themselves a niche on the Wii, or more importantly, Wii-like systems of the future.

There's a market for "premium" games on the Wii, and chances are, that same market is the one that would ponder picking up a "hardcore" game on the Wii.  These same "borderline" gamers are the ones who put down the $50 to buy CoD, or Madden, on the Wii, because they cannot excuse buying a HD console for themselves... but they can excuse a game for themselves now and then.  The $60 pricetag makes sense, from this perspective.  At least I think it does.

@jarrod:

I don't think it's insurmountable, but MH3 is one of those cases where they could create that demograhic on the Wii. They were able to take that risk because the audience wasn't already instrinsic to any other console.

Wait, wait, wait.

Wait.

Are you suggesting that buyers of HD games didn't buy into HD games because HD games appeal to them?

HD games are appealing because they are on HD systems, and catered toward the same demographic that tends to purchase high end hardware for its gaming aesthetic quality.