Sounds like they finished primary work on Aragorn's Quest and felt it was time to clean house. It's sad to hear about cuts at one of the few quality studios focusing on Wii. I hope the remaining crew is large enough to do another Geometry Wars.

What happened to Neal's HoTD Overkill 2 exclusive?  :(

Yeah, I remember that too.  Maybe they decided to shelve the idea of a sequel.

I have a bad feeling that third parties are slowly dumping the wii. Both Ubisoft and Capcom have recently announced that they are cutting back on wii development. Is this an omen for things to come later in the future?

Maybe they're working on No More Heroes and Dead Rising for the 3DS.

If that is the case, I am up for those games games. I just hope that HotD Overkill 2 is not canned because I liked the first game a whole lot.

The Overkill sequel will be WiiS3 once Move tanks.

I think you're going to see a lot of companies dumping Wii development in favor of 3DS development over the next six months.  It's cheaper from a development cost standpoint, and the general consensus is that the 3DS system is going to be a surefire hit.  You won't see third-parties jumping on the bandwagon late this time around, because they know they can make a lot of money if they release quality games for the system right out of the gate.

I think developers will keep making games for the DS, but will swap their Wii development for 3DS development.  After all, the 3DS is GameCube-ish in terms of power, meaning that any Wii development team will already be comfortable working with that level of graphics and system muscle.

But isn't development for the Gamecube-style graphics of the 3DS be the same as the wii? I mean the wii is not too much different than the gamecube. So the developers would be running in cyrcles, right? Unless the 3DS is going to be more successful than the DS and wii? If third parties are planning to drop the wii, the wii 2 should not be too far off from being revealed.

I get what Kytim's saying.

The short answer as to why the 3DS is going to get better third party support is that third parties seemed to have arbitrarily decided to make strong games for the 3DS before it's released.  They're ditching the usual "wait and see" crap like they did with the DS and Wii and making sure they have competitive product in the stores on or near day one.  The long answer involves two primary reasons including the long term health of the various third parties and Nintendo's current financial status.

One reason for this is that, while much hay can be made from the usual whine that only Nintendo games can be sold on Nintendo systems, it doesn't take a genius to figure that's usually because Nintendo makes the better games on said systems.  While this can be useful when you need to write off a system (Nintendo or otherwise) that isn't performing very well, when you ignore a bonafide hit that ends up being the best selling game system of all time because of a preconception, you look like a fool to both gamers and your finance department.  Considering the 3DS is the next system after the best selling system of all time, it's pretty much guaranteed to get a healthy userbase right out of the gate, especially considering their closest competition from Sony seems sluggish to respond or reluctant to participate, and the next competition from Apple seems rather unexciting at this juncture (despite Matt Cassamassina's input.)  One of the things that crippled third parties on the Wii and on the DS initially was the fact that they did not make very good games consistently and mostly tried to cash in on what they perceived as a "casual wave" as evidenced in the "Third Party Wall of Shame" thread here:

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/forums/index.php?topic=30478.0

This gave them pretty bad reputations, as the Wii itself is definitely not an unprofitable platform (just ask Nintendo,) but it can be a prohibitive environment when all 75 million Wii owners think developers that are not Nintendo make junk, and rightly so.  Conversely, if a similar wall were created with the third parties' current 3DS offerings, and consumers were to see this on the shelf accompanied by other high quality titles, then third parties have a decisively better chance to be more relevant to a large userbase.

The second reason for the third party boom is that Nintendo's got a lot more money this time around and is in a better position to give "incentives" for third parties to make games on their handhelds as opposed to their competition, as Sony's game division (and Sony itself) is in dire straits through repeated losses and thus is less inclined to offer incentives, Microsoft seems uninterested in the handheld space at this time, and Apple seems to be unable to turn touchscreen-only micro-transaction games for cellphones and Tablet Macs into real market movement.

I'm not to blame for poor third party sales on Wii. I'm just way too lazy to buy crap.

Nintendo certainly has the potential to become the reigning king of the gaming market once again if certain things continue to go in their favor.

Several examples:

Sony is hurting so financially that it has put them in a situation in which they can not really have any exclusive third party games any more. This could change if development costs and the price of the PS3 continue to decline, but this will not happen until atleast the next generation. If Nintendo could some how tap into these exclusive they could very push Sony to the point of walking the borderline of failure.

Third party success is another key to their dominance.

Keeping the PSP and its successor in it their place and at the same time keeping Apple and Micorsoft out of the handheld service by trumping their attempts to make a credible handheld device.

Considering the person who I talked to about Overkill 2 now co-runs the company, I still stand by my story on that. Although I can more or less 100% confirm that Overkill 2 will be for Move and Wii.

The move version of Overkill 2 will be in HD.

I still don't understand why people are treating the 3DS like the successor to the Wii. They are two entirely different markets.

If anything, the 3DS hardware being on par with Wii hardware (if true) will likely mean that those games could be released on both Wii and 3DS, if the arcitecture is similar and the games could be easily ported to Wii. That's what I think we'll be seeing, until the Wii successor is released.

The possibility goes both ways, though.  The DS market is a much more lucrative market for 3rd parties than the Wii has shown in its life cycle, which makes me think we'll see Wii projects going to the 3DS instead where developers can use a more standard control interface; don't have to bother with motion control; and can actually sell more than a few units.  Hopefully, you're right and this just increases the Wii's library, but I'm not so optimistic.

Was there any doubt it wouldn't be?

How many Wii consoles have been sold?  Sometimes like 70 million worldwide?

How many 3DS systems have been sold?  Oh, that's right--zero.

If system sales were what mattered the Wii would have an amazing third party library. The 3DS is the successor to an even more popular system than the Wii, it has more control options, and is more developer-friendly. They're also banking on the theory that bad third party sales on the Wii are the result of the low quality of early third party software driving people to only buy from Nintendo; by backing it heavily from the start, they hope to avoid that stigma and gain the trust of the mass market.

Short version: To them, the Wii is a lost cause. They're trying to start fresh.

Yes, but the 3DS will be the successor to a handheld where 3rd parties found great success selling a wide variety of games and genres to a much bigger audience than the Wii.  It will also have the silly gimmick of THREEE DEEEEE working in its favor.  The Wii's 3rd party history, however, has not been so kind (especially for companies actually trying to release good games on the platform), with rare exceptions.  I don't see why 3rd parties would even bother to work on the Wii unless they can do quick and dirty ports.