Castle Crashers/Braid

Castle Crashers will have over $10,000,000 revenue and Braid will have over $5,000,000 revenue before the end of the year most likely.

These are the poster children games of the Xbox Live Marketplace. Furthermore I wonder if Castle Crashers will outsell Boom Blox in LTD sales?

Thats the area where theres been the most growth and potential in terms of innovation on consoles.

And how much effort and time went in to Mario Galaxy? A ton. You can't compare the coist of Mario galaxy with the cost of an average HD game. Mario galaxy is one of the best games on the wii. If you were going to be fair with the comparison it should be compared with one of the best games on the HD consoles, so more like GTA IV and MGS, which cost significantly more than 17 million.

Both of the titles you mentioned are more the exception than the rule, however.  Average HD game budgets are pretty close to SMG's (15-20 million, supposedly).  SMG is a quality title, and many of the average budget HD titles are also quality titles.  SMG was pretty much guaranteed to be quality because Nintendo 1st party studios are some of the brightest game devs on the planet, and relatively cheap for a quality title because they likely used the SMS engine to start with (greatly reducing their expenses).  The Wii, inside, is really is not much more than an overclocked GameCube, you know.  SMS would have been a perfect platform to launch the SMG project with -- its practically the same console.

With SMG, Nintendo is merely proving that if you invest in the Wii, you can make it shine.

No matter how much we try to change the questions behind these issues, it seems to me like a fact that ambitious graphical features have become expected on PS3/360 games, leading developers to spend a lot of money developing those games.

The same isn't the case on the Wii (partly due to its performance limitations), therefore Wii games can be made for cheaper.

Conclusion: either PS3/360 games start getting less sophisticated technical and artistic features or there will be fewer PS360 games. Another possibility would be PS360 software sales exploding to the point games would be viable but that doesn't seem realistic.

$20 Million represents the highest end of practical development costs for the Wii, and is also on the lower end of average for HD console games ... While you may not be willing to accept it, most of the HD console games that are in the same weight class as Super Mario Galaxy do/did cost several times as much to develop.

Well.... yeah D'OH! :p

Too many assumptions.

The reality is that's the business model Wii offers and it generated more revunue for EA with Boom Blox.

I was actually wondering what game could be best compared to SMG... What would be a PS360 game with a similar amount of content?

Some Wii games can go out of control, but they would take some really specific conditions, like whatever got Shemue to cost $70 million (in 1999 dollars).

Shenmue was the kind of game where they programmed the weather patterns for individual days for an entire year into the game.

That game was so ambitious it was ridiculous.