donny2112 said:
Fixed, and I agree with those proponents.
Wii is declining earlier than it should have primarily due to third-parties and Nintendo still recovering from 2nd half 2008 and 1st half 2009 (i.e. opening the doors for third-parties and they didn't want to enter) being pretty barren for big 1st-party titles. Again this gen, Japan became an early barometer for the rest of the world. Lack of third-party support there hurt earlier than anywhere else, but it's now hurting elsewhere, too. As Jokeropia so aptly pointed out, though, a "hurting" Wii is still well above the PS3 or 360. Those systems aren't following the "normal" curve mainly because prices took so long (and aren't completely there, yet, for PS3) to reach the traditional "mass market" price of $200 or less.
Fixed, and yes.
I think one of the biggest issues is that third parties really like to play follow the leader, making games primarily in genres that the console maker has shown are viable on the platform.
Back in the PS1 era, Sony decided to heavily push JRPGs, platformers, and racing games, and third parties ended up making major entries in these genres all the way through the PlayStation 2.
When Microsoft entered the console race, they wanted to bring Western PC style games with them. To this end, they released Halo and Fable/KotOR, which lead to a large increase in the number of FPS games and WRPGs on the system. When the Xbox 360 came out, Microsoft really pushed Gears of War, and suddenly we saw a huge amount of cover based third person shooters join the large amount of first person shooters and the notable amount of WRPGs. When Sony decided to do the same with the PS3, largely pushing FPS and TPS games, this just reinforced the genre decisions made by Microsoft, and now it's quite hard to find a major third party game at E3 that doesn't have a gun in it.
With the Wii, Nintendo's major hits were Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Mario Kart, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Zelda. And now, when we look at what few games third parties are making for the system, they're largely making minigame compilations, fitness games, kart racers, and platformers, with the amount of entries in each genre tending to correlate to the sales of the corresponding Nintendo title. As for why there aren't really any SSBB or Zelda like games on the platform from third parties, my guess would be that the former requires a large cast of notable characters which many third parties lack and that it's most likely quite hard to make a Zelda like game with a reduced risk budget and have it still come out alright.
What the top third party developers really do best this generation is make first/third person shooters, RPGs, and action/adventure games (mostly of the hack and slash, open world, and survival horror varieties), almost all of which are M rated. Unless Nintendo is willing to make or really push a game in one of these genres (ESRB rating included) and get it to sell 3-4+ million copies, we're really not going to see the best third party teams making games for the Wii.
Now, there is actually one case where they're doing this, and that's with JRPGs. They managed to secure and (presumably will) really push Dragon Quest X, and they are also publishing two smaller scale JRPGs themselves. However, the issue here is that they really went and did this far too late, because most third parties really don't want to put out games in these genres until after the major title has established the audience, and Dragon Quest X is really coming out far too late in the generation to help.
