third party games do sell well on wii,its just not as good on 360,ut when better quality titles come out they will sell,also look on m&s its sold more then 4 mil and selling about 100k every week

 The average wii game is said t cost between 3-5 million for development, where the PS3/XB360 can range from 10-20 million according to dev reports from GDC

I see your point about the flop thing, what I am saying is that people dont understand that a game that sells a few hundred thousand on the Wii is making the same money as a million seller on the ps3 or xb360. 

Ah, right you are. I was reading your earlier post as saying something like "nothing else matters, a game that sells low is a flop regardless of anything else."  

Turns out you weren't saying anything about development costs etc. I completely agree with your definiton of a flop.

Capcon is not the first developer to have found that their Wii products greatly acceded their own expectations. Guitar Hero III on the Wii was a surprise too. When a company says that a game greatly surpassed their expectations it means that it made a lot more PROFIT than they were expecting because obviously they expected some profit or they wouldn't have released the game.

RE4 and Umbrella Chronicles may not have been the biggest blockbusters ever but their revenue was important enough to have been featured in the opening paragraph, and first bullet item in their financial report.

I think I'm personally annoyed more by the fact that people pick on Zack and Wiki, and No More Heroes as flops and never consider that they're low budget even for Wii games; Zack and Wiki's level based format allows them to reuse most of their graphical assets on several levels, and No More Heroes uses cell shading (in part) because it greatly reduces the ammount of texture work (and if you notice the area is pretty sparse in terms of unnecessary assets). It is quite possible that both these games were in the $1 to $2 Million range to develop, which in terms of return on investment is their sales are similar to sales of 2.5 to 5 Million for a $20 Million budget XBox 360/PS3 game (and 12.5 to 25 Million for a game in the $100 Million budget range like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4 are rumored to be).

Columnists and people on sites like this pay a lot of attention to how a game does compared to expectations and consider that as defining hit or flop.
Game producers are first and foremost a business. I think their definition of hit and flop is solely based on the amount of net profit. If the profits are good they will keep on producing similar games regardless of whether the trade press regards them as successful or not or what review scores they receive. They like a good review, sure, because it tends to sell more games and make more profit. But if the game is making them pots full of money, whether or not some geek on GameSpot likes it is of no great concern. It’s called laughing all the way to the bank and Nintendo owns the franchise.

Cell Shading is not necessarily less expensive than conventional rendering, but I personally think that it was used in No More Heroes and Killer7 because it can be used to hide the fact that there has been less texture work done ... I could be wrong, but being that Grasshopper continues to find publishers when they have never produced a game that has sold (particularly) well implies that they make inexpensive games.

Caveat:  Haven't read all the posts.  But my 2 cents in:

Granted that the lower dev costs for some games make them more profitable in the short term - However...

From an "investor" and "big business" stand point:

A big budget game (eg. Million Seller) - has more potential for even bigger revenues (and hopefully profit) down the road.  For example, games such as "Assassin's Creed" (as an example only, no actual numbers) - may not have made as much money or only broke even with regards to actual game sales BUT it has the potential for additional future revenue from (1) sequels and (2) other media - such as a possible movie, cartoons, etc.

 Therefore, while the 1st game may not have made more than another lower cost game.  But you can see that it possibly has more potential in the future.  And hence that IP is inherently more valuable than a lower cost game with less potential.

Also, though profit ultimately matters - a bigger revenue IP (eg. $50 million in sales) vs a lower revenue IP (eg. $10 million in sales) is more than likely more interesting to big business because it means that more people (or have more paying customers) like the bigger revenue IP and hence its potential is deemed greater.  EVEN though the lower revenue IP may make more dollar in profit.

Also to add - businesses now also look at the actual IP as an asset that can be sold.  As a analogy, if you think about an IP as a sports team and "winning" as profits, it MAY make some sense to see why the big budget games get developed - even though the profit generated might not match (dollar for dollar) to a lower budget IP.

That is, they may be able to sell the actual IP for millions of dollars, even though they may not have generated a lot of actual cash flow profit of it.

Big Budget IP = New York Knicks (losing)

Small Budget IP = San Antonio Spurs (winning)

More likely than not, New York Knicks is worth much more than the San Antonio Spurs, even though they have won much more.