The amount spent on marketing is determined by how much revenue the publisher expects the title to bring in. By marketing time, development costs are sunk, so no, ad costs do not scale with dev budget.
Groucho, its only February. No need to make your "Ass of the Year" push so early.
I love how you got caught with your pants down saying that Galaxy was based on the Sunshine engine, and so tried to turn it around to say that Nintendo must be stupid not to reuse engines. Of COURSE Galaxy has its own engine. At the least, they totally reworked the engine to add the gravity system. (D'uh.) Nintendo always wants to go back to the drawing board and rethink things, and they would especially after Sunshine underperformed at retail.
And even if there's some source somewhere that says Galaxy cost 16-17m bucks... Is that really the highest dev budget you can find listed for a Wii game? Well under the $20m mark, for the highest-rated game on Wii, which is loaded to the brim with content, and was expected to sell many millions of copies, is supposed to prove that dev costs scale more with ambition than with amount of art assets? Even if $10m is the low end for a large scale HD game, we still know that games regularly reach the $20m mark, and these games are expected to sell 1-3m generally.
And what on earth was that "indie movie" example about? Indie movies have tiny investments, but are they "shovelware"? Devs/pubs make a higher investment when they have a reasonable expectation for higher revenue, but this is not connected to the quality of the product. A lot of shovelware with 10-20 man teams, the cost of a popular license, and a retail push, probably has a higher investment than indie games with a 1-5 man team, no licensing and no retail push.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
