Wii game budgets 1/4 of HD budgets according to EA

[Erik Aston]

Ambition and raw cost are totally unrelated. What on earth does ambition have to do with cost?!?!

Some of the most ambitious projects are created on shoestring budgets. They are ambitious because that shoestring is someone's entire life savings. Some indie film maker pouring every cent they own into a project, has far more ambition than some bigwig choosing which scripts deserve $50 million and which deserve $100 million.

Ambition is taking a higher risk, for the potential of a higher reward. The Blair Witch Project was more ambitious than Hancock.

Basing an entire game on a student contest winner like De Blob, is far more ambitious than a follow-the-leader project like Kane and Lynch or Saint's Row, which probably had higher budgets, especially for advertising.

In reality, investment is proportionate to expected return. Publishers make an investment expecting a certain rate of return. If the expected return goes up, they'll make a higher investment. If it goes down, they'll cut corners. To the extent that actual return is a function of the size of the investment, this creates self-fulfilling prophesies. But if everything had returns proportionate to the investment, there would be no "flops" or "break-out hits."

I do think that Groucho is right to an extent, that EA is probably talking not just about lower art asset costs, but different types of projects.

However, the ability for different types of projects to succeed on Wii is not a negative.

Games like Dead Space, Sonic and the Black Knight and Monster Hunter 3 are all coming to Wii at least partly because of lower dev costs.

According to VGC numbers, Sonic Unleashed has sold more on PS360 combined, but only Wii ever gets exclusive Sonic games. That's because if your expected dollar sales are the same regardless of platform, Wii costs less.

And console developers are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to having a break-out hit on the HD systems. Traditional PC devs, like Valve, Bethesda and Epic, have established practices for turning profits making huge-scale games on a high-piracy platform. With low piracy on home consoles, they take in huge margins, and additional investments increase the quality of the game beyond what traditional console developers are yet able to produce.

So Wii's advantages are really two-fold. For a similar type of game, Wii's cost may not be just 1/3rd of an HD game. However, there is a higher potential for a "break-out hit" with a traditional console game instead of a traditional PC game.