Agreed.
There's plenty of great stuff out there, like I discovered by researching which DSiWare games to buy... but it's all a matter of knowing what good games there are out there.
When a new WiiWare game comes out it's easy to just assume it's going to be some random trash that nobody would want.
They need to find better ways at helping people find these good titles.

Um why would a mobile device be a problem to a living room device again? _

It's like saying that DS is the problem of the Wii.

Or the Saumsung Galaxy Tab is hurting the XBOX 360.

Now if you were saying App Store was a threat to DSiWare I would see your point. But WiiWare, No..

Please have some common sense next time you post.

Yes, It really never catched My interest too much (I only have 2 WiiWare games as shown on My backloggery) and a lot of crappy games ended up on WiiWare, Which really dragged it down IMO.

well I bought more Wiiware than XBLA games it must have done something right (and by something, I mean somehow got the best game of 2008, World of Goo)

You have two games and can claim there is a lot of crap on the service? You have experienced next to nothing on the service.

I would say that the Wii Shop was a flop and Nintendo's setup and promotion of it.
However, there were some very good WiiWare games.

The points system prevented me from getting more games.
I hated to buy a block of points and have leftovers that just sit there.

Not only that but the Wii Shop is not very organized to find a game unless you know the category or name.
Because of this, I would usually look here at Nintendo Life at the games out now and sort by reviews.

Not only that but I have recently learned that they have been removing games such as The Magic Obelisk

I've bought 24 WiiWare titles so far and enjoyed most of them. So, was WiiWare a flop? No. Not for me. - I would even say WiiWare and Virtual Console were the two most interesting things on the Wii that have distinguished the Wii from the Gamecube. And they are the reason why I originally visited this web site (then known as "WiiWare World" and "VC Reviews").

I don't think so.
I enjoyed the WiiWare service and the games.
I bought 11 WiiWare titles and loved all of them and there are still titles I want to buy.

WiiWare had some really good games, the problem is it also got over-run with shallow, repetitive and boring games which, personally, brought the whole service crashing down, couple this together with the appauling search function and you get a shopping experience that's annoying to use and over-run with rubbish games.

WiiWare has some amazing games, don't get me wrong, but the problem is finding those games. It's a lot like trying to find a gem amongst a whole buncha cow crap, eventually you'll get there but sifting through the fail takes a while. The only way to know if there are any good games on the service is to come to sites like this and have demos, unfortunately demos came and they went.

DSiWare didn't fair any better either, it was slow loading, the search didn't work and there is a TON of rubbish on the service. It's the exact same with WiiWare, having to sift through it all is boring and half-way through you just give up.

But was WiiWare a flop... I wouldn't say no, but I wouldn't say yes either. Nintendo could've done a lot more with it than this, I've bought quite a fair few WiiWare games, but getting to them can take a while and with the help of Nintendo Life I eventually got there and got some right little gems.

Yeah.
I had very few DSiWare games on my DSi for this very reason, but now I have many on my 3DS because they made it a lot easier to search around and find which games are actually worth downloading.
Hopefully it'll be the same story with WiiWare.
Right now it's so hard to find out if any games are actually worth the trouble that most people probably don't really bother with the service at all... But if all the WiiWare titles get transfered over to the Wii U's shop, which I'm assuming will have better search and rating features, etc. then it could provoke a lot of people to finally give some of the hidden gems a crack.

I agree with all of this. Also important to notice how it wasn't available immediately. Originally, WiiWare referred to the Internet Channel and Everybody Votes Channel and such, then it changed. Because WiiWare games were not available from the get-go they tried to slip it in, but it didn't work with a lot of people.

Plus, most the WiiWare games are little bursts of action. You know, stuff I can play on the Internet. Like, when I sit down and want to Wii it out, I wanna do some Mario Galaxy or Brawl or Fire Emblem or Zelda or some CONSOLE game.

It's like Nintendo was playing catch-up, in a sense.

Here's what happened:
PSN gets announced. Me gets exited for PS online.
XBL gets announced. Me gets exited for XB online.
WiiWare announced. Me is so very, very, dissapointed.

So in my eyes, yes, WIiWare WAS a flop.

WiiWare and DSiWare should have some connectivity or something. Like PSN on PS3 and PSP.

WiiWare wasn't a flop in my opinion based on the fact that I got Hydroventure (Fluidity) from it and consider that to be one of the best games I've ever played. Without the service, I might never have got that game.

Don't get me wrong, the service is pretty rubbish in it's execution, but that doesn't make it a flop, just a pain to use.

Personally I would have rathered the (very) few talented developers that did bother with WiiWare to make the money that they deserved for their ideas.

From the developer point of view surely WiiWare was an utterly embarrasing failure.

Well, I personally didn't put a WiiWare game out and don't know what sort of returns my employers got from WiiWare so cannot comment on that.

Just by looking at marketshare it's difficult to imagine too many devs rolled in cash after a WiiWare release.

When I think of games like World of Goo, the BIT.TRIP series, Cave Story, NyxQuest, Frobot, Art of Balance, and Fluidity, I certainly don't think of a flop. Now did it have a lot of crap, yep. But there were some amazing games available on the service as well.

Having said that, Xbox Live Arcade is still by far and away my favorite digital download service, by a significant margin, in fact.

Muscle March.

If you sprinkle a few diamonds on a pile of poo it still stinks.

WiiWare was a flop. u_u

If it was easier to use, not so messy, then it'd be decent. Due to its lack of streamlinedness, it was subpar.