Spending more money on development doesn't necessarily translate into better games, and a lot of what EA has done on the Wii has been appropriate investment levels on development for the risk associated with the title. Where EA has failed with several of these titles (Boom Blox comes to mind) is supporting the title with an appropriate level of marketing to ensure that people who would be interested in the title know it exists.

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.

The point was not that wii fit wasn't profitable. It's just to show that the difference in cost for PS360 games vs wii games isn't as black and white as people like to paint it out to be. EA can pull off a strategy like wii fit's for dead space wii and it would cost just as much as the ps360 version easily.

Oh there is:

1. Erect plenty of strawmen to obfuscate the original point.

2. As each strawman is burnt in turn by more knowledgeable/reasonable posters, build more.

3. Drone on endlessly about how this caveat or that exemption somehow renders all other posters' comments null and void--it helps to keep mixing in heaping helpings of additional strawmen to really bog down the conversation.

4. Repeat until reasonable people get tired and leave the thread.

5. Voila! Counter (and completely confused, illogical, and senseless) argument!

I'll pass on responding to comments not worthy of it.

Here's an entertaining link explaining yet another number behind EA's HD sports franchise costs. This particular cost would also be identical, no matter what platform the title is on.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/951/951534p1.html

You don't give up, do you?   That's a multi-year license for rights to the NFLPA.   That cost is amortized across 9 SKU's (3 curent gen home console, 2 last gen home console, 2 portables, PC and mobile).

The article states:

"It's not clear whether the money covered several years or just one 12-month period. GamePolitics assumes the latter. "

If you know different, perhaps you could explain to us how you do.  Or are you just... you know... yammering on.. again.. about something you know nothing about?

Because the NFLPA doesn't do single year licenses. Granted it might just have been 2 years but they don't do a single year license. Or at least they didn't as of last year.

Since when did the PS3 and the 360 become the same machine? I mean I keep hearing 360+PS3 combined need X sales to break even. Excuse me, but last time I checked they were very different beasts. You can't just cut and paste the code. The PS3 in particular is known for its complexity to program. Also I can't remember the last time I saw a game that supported both in the same box, heck usually commercials are even done separately. What about the cost of a Blu-Ray disc? Those are certainly more expensive to produce than a plain-jane DVD. So lets get real guys, sure cross platform development is easier between the 360 and the PS3 but it is certainly not free and there are many other costs that need to be counted as well.

Someone (at either Ubi or EA) said that a PS3 SKU of a 360 title adds 10% to the total development cost and, as for the costs of a Blu-Ray disc, that's included in the licensing fee (which, if Sony has half a brain, aren't much, if any, worse than MS).