Everyone knows it's hugely successful, everyone understands it has brought a new audience to games (or at least to game consoles - handheld platforms and online casual gaming have been pulling in families, old people and middle-aged women for years), but there still seems to be a bit of confusion around about what Wii is and how to create a strong software market for Nintendo's oddity.

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about how Wii gamers don't buy that many games. Sure, hardly groundbreaking stuff - we know that the console basically survives on its big in-house titles, and we know that third-party devs have had trouble producing compelling games (see here for the latest article on the subject).

However, the writer points out that even the big-hitters aren't pulling in the numbers. Super Smash Brothers, shifted 1.4 million copies in its first week in the States, but then sales dropped 90% over the following month. Zack & Wiki and No More Heroes have also failed to make much of a dent on the charts.

Partly this is about 'casual' gamers not having the same urgent need to keep buying games. Lazard Capital analyst, Colin Sebastian, told the NYT:

You don't see a lot of titles that reach 30 to 40 percent of the installed base. My in-laws in Texas have a Wii sitting on their living-room floor next to the TV, which to me is kind of amazing. They have Wii Sports, a Brain Age game, Wii Play. That's about it.

But pundits are also placing some of the blame on poorly focused marketing:

Game makers have yet to embrace unconventional advertising methods that can reach this broader audience. Nintendo did it by promoting its memory game Brain Age on the radio.

It's funny, but now that the games industry has made contact with this strange alien race of non-hardcore gamers, they're not really sure how to talk to them. Not everyone can afford to hire Nicole Kidman to pretend to enjoy their games on prime time TV slots - indeed, that approach might be too sophisticated for a lot of the new user base.

I mean, why is it always assumed that you must go super upmarket to capture a non-specialist audience? As a freelancer, I accidentally watch quite a bit of daytime TV, yet during ad breaks, I rarely see Wii games touting for business amid the stream of debt consolidation shysters. Why not? Not all Wii owners read Vogue.

Of course, it's debatable whether filling the airwaves with ads would make much difference - the underlying problem is, Wii owners just don't buy that many games, and probably never will. I liked what Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, recently said about the popularity of the console. He referred to it as a viral phenomenon:

It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends. So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on.

This reminds me of what Brian Hastings of Insomniac said about Wii in his polemical blog post, Ten Reasons Why PS3 Will Win This Generation:

Your friend Reggie invites you over for a Wii Party. It's awesome. You and your friends partake in whatever beverages are legally appropriate for your age group. The next day everyone who went to the party rushes out and buys a Wii. A week later Reggie hosts another Wii Party. This time only half the group comes. It's still fun, but there isn't quite as much shoving to get at the Wiimote.

The next week Reggie hosts another Wii Party. You tell him you have bird flu.

Of course, both Brian and Mike are from the US school of hardcore gritty shooters, and Brian's insistence that Wii was a fad is now looking extremely dated. But they may have a point about the console's transitory appeal - plus, their ambivalence speaks volumes about how the industry is confused and factional in its relationship to the machine.

Almost everyone wants to love Wii, they're just not sure how. And this industry isn't geared up for complicated love affairs - at least not in the west, where development infrastructures are very much tuned toward working on advanced 3D engines and then exploiting them with various boys own adventures.

I may be partisan, but I reckon mobile developers are going to rise up and steal the Wii third-party market away. They're used to dealing with an entirely unpredictable audience, they're used to creating the sort of bizarre lifestyle/puzzle franchises that casual gamers gulp up in their millions; and mobile companies don't have any qualms about advertising in 'low brow' places like the backs of magazines alongside adult chat lines (heck, most of them write adult games).

That's my prediction. And that's probably why I'm not a highly paid marketing analyst, dishing out stat-packed reports on the nature of Wii.