I have zero patience for the Wii's third party situation because it is the market leader and that was until now the formula for attracting the best third party support.
Do you remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes head of the Stonecutters Society through some old code about a birthmark indicating some kind of "chosen one." And they were all repulsed and hated the idea of Homer being the leader of their club so they instituted a new club called the No Homers?
Not to inject a tiny bit of politics, but did you ever wonder why all of a sudden Barack Obama's "citizenship" was suddenly being questioned by people who just HATED the idea of a black man being president?
For years it was the third parties who were denying support to Nintendo's consoles on this very issue, and the moment they had to put their money where their mouth was, all of a sudden, excuse after excuse came out, trying to hide the fact that most of them had prematurely chosen the PS3 or the 360 as their bets for the market leader, or their pockets were stuffed with moneyhats the whole time last generation.
I tend to side more with the third parties because of Nintendo's reputation and the extreme unlikeliness that EVERY third party is colluding together to specifically screw the Wii over,
Who said they were all working together? They could all be equally independently idiotic and all tried a bunch of spinoffs nobody wanted or Wii Sports knockoffs or half-hearted casual games meant to cash in or drum up revenue for risky HD titles. And WOW! That's what happened.
even if it means going out of business or that every videogame company in the world except Nintendo are a bunch of idiots.
You know I tend to get my knuckles rapped for continually bringing up Nintendo's quite lucrative existence for the past three years or so vs. their competition and their detractors. But, here said facts are very useful in determining this particular subject matter. Just going by profits and revenues, Nintendo is indeed a very smart company, and third parties, generally, have been struggling quite severely, (sans any that have a direct line of revenue for continued existence from a console manufacturer.) and some have almost institutionalized losses over the last 3 years, which would indicate them as less than smart, wouldn't you agree?
I see the Wii's hardware incompatibility with the HD consoles as a much more likely source of the problem.
Are you trying to make my point
for me? Here you indicate that suddenly something other than market leadership is the main factor for third parties' support, when they used to parrot on and on about "userbase this, marketshare that." Everybody last generation (including you yourself) said that was the #1 thing Nintendo had to fix for the next round. "Get a higher userbase." And they did. And now suddenly it's about a bunch of other factors they didn't care about last generation until suddenly they do this generation.
Nintendo should continue their efforts to meet whatever 3rd parties' wishes are as far as hardware goes, while trying simultaneously to be freshly innovative to retain their advantage over their console competitors (see: motion control, glasses-less 3-D, elimination of loadtimes, etc). But unless there is some sort of guarantee that third parties will make strong games for the system, they shouldn't go above and beyond what they're already doing as far as this issue is concerned. Maybe the idea of the Wii2 being considered a smashing success regardless of actual performance before it is released will play in next round. It worked for the PS3.