The values held by many developers also make them intent on excluding Nintendo in their ideas/projects. It's as if their means of successfully competing with Nintendo is being enemies of the entire Nintendo brand.
Can you elaborate on that because it's an interesting point? Are you saying that Nintendo's success is a threat to them making the games they want to make so they treat Nintendo as an enemy?
Some days I can convince myself that third parties have some vendetta here but I can't longterm. It just doesn't make sense because it's not good business. Some companies may let bizarre grudges and personal feelings get in the way of good business, but with the Wii it ain't some third parties. It's like EVERY third party that is even remotely worth a damn is treating it like garbage. ALL of these companies consider themselves enemies of Nintendo? That's just too conspiracy theory.
I think that Nintendo offering hardware that's too different from the other consoles, mixed with Nintendo's complete lack of effort to give anyone a reason to care, is a more likely reason. You can't just include the Wii in most multiplatform games and Nintendo doesn't provide any incentives to make a Wii exclusive while Sony and MS do. Nintendo probably just has no rapport with the devs that matter and makes no effort to.
They've also gone out of their way to market the Wii as casual-focused grandma console, and third parties are unsure if their games that don't target this market (ie: their GOOD games) will find an audience on the Wii. We argue this is a misconception but I don't see Nintendo working to correct that. If anything Nintendo almost exclusively toots the casual horn and just perpetuates the stereotype. Nintendo acts like the "casual vs. core" situation doesn't even exist and that just makes them look casual-focused.
Let's.
Bear in mind I try to maintain a distinction between publishers (administrators) and developers (laborers). Developers are sources of new ideas and content while publishers are responsible for content delivery AND have the simple power to force the developer into producing "more" content within an existing framework/property (as opposed to working on brand new ideas/properties).
Publishers are about business. There's a desire that's framed to make money, but usually not framed in a way to make customers; a quantity of existing customers are expected to exist, with an objective to continue extracting revenues from that same quantity of customers (at the root of it is the whole "demographic" nonsense). The Pubs like to capitalize on trends, leading to licensed games, sequelitis, genre saturation, etc. Sticking with what's popular is good business, as they understand. Things go awry when there's a disconnect between their internal business, the content side, and the customers. They weren't necessarily opposing Wii by dumping their garbage on the system, they're following trends, as usual. And since their grasp of the content and customers was/is poor, the resource management and development of the titles are poor. Pubs that might've been burned early on by "the casual failure" now have a stronger basis for making Nintendo an enemy.
The developers in question are extreme geeks/nerds. They want their prided content presented via the latest & greatest toys. One path to demonstrating their accomplishment is utilizing "cutting edge ____", usually graphics. The Wii platform easily appeared as a threat partly due to its different value set, making the value in graphics/tech/etc seem much less relevant. The popular hate-notion would be "all the attention Wii is getting means there's so many people that don't appreciate our special new gamer-game." --But this isn't what I'm getting at. Really, their [the game's] ability to STAND OUT in the market [even among its gamer-game peers] is highly dependent on using the feature-heavy high-powered computators. It's not just their prestige of making a fine craft, it's their BUSINESS that's dependent. From this point, I see the developer's disconnect with the business side causing things to go awry.
For many, proportionally "increasing content (or recycling to like-new)" by "increasing tech" is their ONLY path to securing a place in the market (and thus we're also diseased with pay-DLC, joy). This is a costly path to travel. Wii, in all its cobweb tech glory, does away with this approach (their bloated game project can't achieve the performance nor the recognition they want), eliminating their only visible path to sustainability, making it an "easy" decision to exclude Wii in potential projects. This is where I see begin to see the "bad business" (that, or it just proves they're not really talented game makers in the first place) coming from the developers as well as publishers.
Wii is a current, popular system, and has the undisputed largest audience, including a multi-million Mature Zelda/Smash Bros. audience; why skip it? You want to have rich visuals, spending much more money on graphical asset production, endangering the financial stability of your hip new independent games studio, for a game that functions just like the ones that came out last generation? Publishers, you don't have the courtesy to provide a "Wii version" at all (Wiimers supposedly don't care all that much about graphics anyway, right? just like in Brown of Duty: Buttflex), even tho the dev costs are relatively cheap? Here's what bothered me most: there's all this game-making talent from last generation out there, and the last generation Wii hardware should already be familiar; why are the Wii efforts well below that of last generation's best (in basic function and performance)?
3rd Parties, how can you find an audience if you're not looking for it? Where is your marketing? Why must the audience have to "be there" in the first place? Why aren't you taking the initiative to make your own and nurture it? If you never did that, how the **** did you manage to develop yourselves as a gaming brand in the first place?
WHY, WE INVESTED IN A LOT OF BAD LICENSED GAMES AND HAD TO SHUT DOWN DEV STUDIOS HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW WE SAVED MONEY THAT TIME, DIDN'T WEIf they're not enemies they're a bunch of lazy snobs, unFit to participate in Wii's active lifestyle.