Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: 3rd party titles do not sell on the Nintendo Wii. Yes we know, that statement has been beaten to death, but it somehow manages to keep rearing its head like Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th.

EA Sports unit president Peter Moore sat down for a little Q&A with MTV Multiplayer and revealed their approach to dealing with the struggling sales of EA’s major sports titles on the Wii. To date, according to Moore the Tiger Woods franchise “is EA’s number one selling game on the Wii period. Period!” More explicitly, Tiger Woods PGA 09 has sold 141,000 copies to date on the console.

Now when you consider that other flagship titles like Madden sell 2 million copies on other competing systems, but only move 174,000 units on the Wii, that begins to raise some eye brows. Moore put it frankly saying, “The challenge we face is that that consumer gets ‘Wii Sports‘ right out of the box and that’s a sports experience that’s good enough for a lot of people. That is a challenge for us at times.”

To EA’s credit they have tried to cater to the Wii Sports crowd, introducing the All Play mechanic to each of their core sports franchises, and have had some success. If you look at the sales for Madden for instance, this year’s version, Madden All-Play 09, has sold 176,000 copies versus Madden 08 which moved 174,000 units.

Things aren’t all bad as Moore looks to the future, “The bottom line is we knew what we weren’t doing right. We’ve corrected that. We’re seeing progress. Is it easy? No. Will we ever see attach rates for authentic sports games, for licensed sports games, on the Wii to the same we see on 360 or PS3? Probably not in this cycle. Are we going to see continued growth of both? Absolutely.”

Like the old saying goes, ‘If at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again.’ While no one can read the future, it’s nice to see one of the big companies out there actually putting their money where their mouth is, versus crying and blaming Nintendo.