Wii Breaks Sales Records While Third Parties Flee System

[A Black Falcon]

I'm not saying Nintendo r teh doomed, the big picture is that the Wii is becoming niche and aims to exclude gamers, focusing on new markets.

The Wii sales are fantastic, but at the cost of alienating people who want video games. This isn't like the N64 or Gamecube where Nintendo was 3rd place and the first party software was amazing. They're 1st, by a large margin, but the first party software deals with weight loss and mini-games. All the 'real games' are on other systems.

That's just not entirely true. Nintendo does have some hardcore games too... yes, fewer than they used to because of stuff like Wii Fit and Wii Music, but they still do have them.

It's third parties that are really causing the "Wii is for minigames" problem. I mean, Nintendo has made some, but not that many more than they published before...

The N64 had three Mario Party games, the GC four plus WarioWare... Wii has just one Mario Party, plus a WarioWare and Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Sports Resort. So far, the Wii and GC have the same number of minigame-focused titles.

One problem is that Nintendo has gone back to its bad old ways of not releasing lots of games in the US. The list of first-party-published DS games that have not gotten US releases is ridiculously long now, and the Wii list isn't that far behind it... sure, they finally did pick up a couple of them recently, but they're still horrible on this. Heck, even Europe has gotten several games we haven't -- they got the Wii Trace Memory sequel and Disaster too.

Sure, the titles they're skipping are mostly stuff that core gamers would like, so they aren't anything that would make a big impact on Nintendo's success. And this is obviously why they have skipped them. But they should be able to realize what kind of impact this kind of behavior has on their harder-core fans... Sega Saturn fans still won't forgive Sega for all the great Saturn games they passed on releasing here. Maybe angering your hardcore fans means nothing, but I'd think making at least SOME kind of effort would be worthwhile... I mean, it's not like all of those games would bomb if they released here, I'm sure.