This is a curious development.

I think the drop in stock price comes down to these factors

1. Investors are starting to understand that Sony is going to do better then they thought this generations. Although it is doubtful they will be #1 this generation, they are not going to bomb like some have suggested.

2. 3rd party sales on the Wii have not been as great as people would like. Now most of this is due to software quality. The Wii is just different enough that most developers are still getting use to it.

3. Overall software sales for the Wii being somewhat disappointing. The Software attachment rate is not what people would like, although not unsurprising given the new demographic they are going after.

I would argue that nintendo should still be considered a buy.

The DS faced simular problems that the Wii is having now. We should start seeing some great games for the Wii coming from the 3rd party developers this next year. Also Nintendo has a lot of wiggle room price wise if Wii sales ever start to dip.

I would be very surprised is Nintendo didn't come out #1 this generation. I don't think they will dominate in the same way the PS2 did, but they should have the largest install base.

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Props for the Trading Places pic. :-P

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Trading Places is made of win.

As Cameron Mulder stated, 3rd parties have a lot to do with it, but I think for different reasons. Yeah, 3rd party games haven't been so good, but I think this is not because they are unaccustomed to the system, but because they are cheap and lazy. There is no good reason that Far Cry should have been as ugly as it was, for example. It was simply Ubisoft's way of getting something out as quickly as possible for a bit of quick profit.

Wii's current popularity could be its biggest obstacle; as long as it continues to sell as well as it has been, developers will rush games out without putting any effort, under the assumption that any Wii game is automatically going to sell well, and the additional assumption that the "casual gaming" audience can't tell the difference between quality and crap.

When Brain Age was really successful on the DS, developers assumed that it was the genre that made it popular rather than the quality, and created a bunch of games which, though they had similar premises, were not nearly as good. It's just like when games are based on popular licenses, such as movies or children's television. The products are all but programmed by marketing teams.

On Wii, there are two trends: minigames and ports. Instead of finding one good use for the unique controls and perfecting it (as was done in Super Mario Galaxy, Resident Evil 4, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Dewy's Adventure), most third parties are finding as many methods of control as they possibly can and either stuffing them all into a package of random uninspired waggle (Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Super Monkey Ball, Mario Party) or shoehorning them into "additional content" (Tomb Raider Anniversary).

It seems that the only companies bothering to put in the effort and money necessary to make anything even remotely worth playing are Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami. Other companies, even big names like Ubisoft, EA, Hudson, and Activision are too busy shoveling crap onto the market to realize that their skeptical views of consumers' intelligence is actually going to cause them to lose out on even more potential sales than they're already getting. If they understood that consumers CAN tell the difference, they'd probably be willing to put in the extra time and money needed to create better games in exchange for the extra profit that they haven't yet figured out would go with it.

Also, buy Zack & Wiki, Geometry Wars: Galaxies, Dewy's Adventure (and when it's released, the Wii port of Okami), as well as any other good-but-insignificant games you can think of. If publishers see games like these selling well based on their quality rather than licensing of popular brands, it may improve the likelihood of getting more good games in the future instead of cheap cash-ins.

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I don't believe "the average consumer" will know the difference. Sure, WE know because we read the blogs, magazines, and from what our friends liked. But there are people out there with DS's and Wii's who *don't understand what a good game is* and are scared of the more complex games. I feel as an avid gamer it's important to make the more "hardcore" games accessible. I mean, I like them I think they're fun let's get grandpa, mom and little sister on board too!

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