Let's look at it in an apples to apples comparison:

Killzone 2 is an exclusive FPS for the PS3. It is designed to push the console to its graphical limits as much as possible. Its development costs are rumored to be $60 million.

The Conduit is an exclusive FPS for the Wii. It is designed to push the console to its graphical limits as much as possible. I can't find anything on its development costs. Does anyone think it even comes close to $60 million?

8 million tops, I would bet more like 3-4. SMG was being developed for years by some of the top programmers in the world and only cost 15 or so.

3-4M for the Conduit?  You realize that 100K/employee/year is the standard, right?  15-20 employees for 2 years then on the Conduit?  And of course they get their motion capture, etc. for free, right?  Mocap studios love giving time for free.

Lets use GTA4 again as an example, while we're at it.  Most of that $100M... voice acting, actor mocap, licensing.  If you can't deduce it on your own, those expenses have nothing to do with platform-specific development, per se, and everything to do with ambition.  GTA4 on the Wii probably would have cost $85-90M, at the least, given the same grade of resources.

Production value == cost.  It has nothing to do with platform, and everything to do with project ambition.   That's the last time I'll say it.

Tell me: where exactly did you get this "standard" from? Because I can tell you for a fact that it is way, way off from what some of us like to call reality. Yes, a few members of a team might command that kind of money, but the vast majority? No, just...no.

You promise?

By the way, you are wrong, the process of creating HD resulution textures takes up a LOT more man hours than the equivalent SD textures, that jacks up the production costs of an HD game right off the bat, not to mention the creation of higher quality assests (models, enviroments etc.). it is not ambition that drives the costs into the stratosphere, it is the creation of HD content (which is not to say that a game with higher ambitions will not cost more, but that an equvilant game on an HD and SD system will have a sizable cost difference). How you have come up with your little tangents I have no idea, but this is pretty much what EVERYONE in this thread has been saying while you have been fighting your little strawmen (and losing pretty badly, I might add)

First, The Conduit was made by about 30 people since October 2007.  It will be released around June 2009.

Second, way to change the subject.

Third,  let's say GTA4 was built from the ground up for the Wii.  Every single texture would need to be much less detailed since it is only going to be viewed in SD.  That leads to less people making the game in less time.  Do you really think that will save so little money?

Just as a side note, Japaneese developers do not use "Game Engines" in the same way that western developers do ...

From my (very limited) understanding of the inner workings of Japaneese game developers, they tend to maintain a centralized code-base of loosely related libraries. The reason for this is that, unlike Wester Developers (who tend to focus on one or two closely related genres), many Japaneese developers work on a wide variety of games that (tend to) have very different technical requirements and they want added flexibility that wasn't available from game engines initially. This attitude is changing being that hardware has become powerful enough that you no longer need the performance benefits of custom software to make a decent looking game ... but I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo was still working off of the library ideology.

With this in mind, I wouldn't be that surprised if Nintendo did or did not use Super Mario Sunshine as a base for Super Mario Galaxy ...

Are people seriously saying that ambition has no correlation to costs?

To draw up a quick comparison, take a game like Burnout Paradise. It has a vast, open racing world. Furthermore it has seamless online intergration that can be accessed without any hassle at the click of a button, great physics etc. It's clearly a cut above most of what EA have procuded on the Wii. Then you look at stuff like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Battlefield: Bad Company, with voice acting, open worlds, just ambition in general. When you're trying to make a game like this, it's going to cost more, of course it is.

IT's no surprise to me that a game like Boom Blox or EA Party of MySims or NERF-Strike cost a third of the price to produce, aside from graphics there's still alot of things they're doing to cut costs.

I'm by no means saying that HD assets and graphics arn't upping the costs, but when you're comparing Boom Blox and NERF-Strike to Dead Space and Burnout Paradise, no matter what system you put them on the latter are going to cost more.

How "ambitious" a game is, is directly related to how much a game costs and you could consider the visual improvement that goes along with HD game development to be an increase in "ambition" of the project ...

Basically, suppose that MySims cost $2 to $4 Million to develop for the Wii. To take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of the HD consoles and produce a similar game would (probably) boost the cost of development to somewhere between $6 and $12 Million. At the same time a more "Ambitious" game like Grand Theft Auto built from the ground up for the Wii would probably cost $10 to $20 Million to develop, and similar projects on the HD consoles are hitting $40 to (over) $100 Million to develop.

And he wonders why people don't think he's a games programmer.... 100K an employee as standard... wow.

For refrence...

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Video_Game_Designer/Salary/by_Industry

http://www.animationarena.com/video-game-salary.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18406129/