"Microsoft owns the office; Sony owns the living room; and Wii owns the closet." - Jack Tretton

It's not the most perfect of quotes, but it is quite apt. Nintendo's console has been hailed as a success from sheer sales volume alone, let alone the demographics it has managed to break into when compared to "traditional" gaming. So why does the Wii sit in the closet?

The answer is simple - its less a console, more a toy. A board game that just happens to be electronic. There is very little out for the console that actually caters to solo gaming, and as such unless you are a party animal or the supplier of electronics to some form of student common room, there is no reason you should play that over a 360, PS3 or your PC.

To add to this distinct lack of solo games, there is a distinct lack of quality in what there is. For every decent Wii-exclusive single player game (Madworld, Super Mario Galaxy) there are several incredibly poor excuses for releases. Admittedly, none of which are really memorable, so I'll leave you the Wii Metacritic Scorepage.

Basically, Nintendo has turned both of its flagship consoles (the Wii and the DS) into the casual gaming equivalent of the PS2, and even earlier on than that the SNES. When a console becomes a household name - a console rather than a company - a lot of the smaller development companies release a large quantity of low-quality games in order to try and cash in on the console boom. This rarely worked, as along with your fifty pieces of crap programming there were several hundred other bits of crap programming from your rival small dev houses. but it worked often enough for people to keep doing it.

The Wii, and to a lesser extent the DS, has become the basis for the seventh generation crap generator. However! Despite the stupid amount of sales of the console, the attach rate (that is, the number of games a Wii owner owns for the console) is really low. So low, in fact, that you actually make less profit producing games for Nintendo consoles than for the now rather out of date PS2. There have only been a few games that have sold over a million units on the Wii, and most of those were in-house Nintendo titles.

So despite being a family console with large sales figures, very few Wii owners actually own more than a couple games, if even that. This scares away the bigger developers, which means it scares away the major producers of decent single player games. This is before we even consider the profit, or rather the lack of it.

This Kotaku article gives a basic overview of why, via the New York Times. Basically, a Nintendo exec - the Nintendo exec, Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America - stated that in order for a game to make a profit on the wii, it simply has to sell a million units. Sounds easy, until you remember that very few games on the Wii have actually sold a million copies (sixteen, at the time of the article's writing), and nine of those are Nintendo releases in the first place.

To be honest, it matters little for Nintendo itself. They sell the hardware, as soon as it leaves their hands they don't really care. They are rapidly catching up the PS2 in total sales for the Wii and if you take in the fact the DS has sold more than a hundred million units world wide, they are probably the only major company in the industry right now that isn't panicking about the recession.

But if you, the consumer, want to buy a console, dont be fooled by Wii's cheap price point compared to the 360 or PS3. What makes the console is the games, and right now, the Wii is 94% dust collector.