It's using attach ratio to try to make the HD systems look better and Wii games look worse. It wasn't magically true with the PS2, but they refuse to acknowledge that.

If it's so clear cut, why do they still support the HD consoles more after more than 2 years?

I'm guessing it doesn't take long either to make great games for the wii, so we should expect a DS like support this year into next year.

I think we all knew this. Even all the people denying that HD games cost more to make knew this deep down.

It's like 'how could they not cost more?' Unless they don't take advantage of the Hardware. Which is suicide on HD systems since they mostly compete with their number of technical advancements.

Market diversification is my best guess. There's a limited number of buyers on each console, and ignoring the HD crowd would be just as foolish as ignoring the Wii.

Because they make money off of install base and not actual units sold.

Fail

The same HD art assets can be used for both the 360 and the PS3 versions.  Since your article said that the difference in production costs is because of the art stuff then a more fair comparison would be to add the PS3 and 360 together in this case. 

CoD:WaW will probably make a tidy sum of money before all is said and done, but compared to the other two versions it is still doing poorly, and they continue to outsell it.

Not all HD console games are bad investments even though they may be quite expensive to develop ...

Realistically, EA (and other major publishers) are probably going to be much more selective of the kinds of games they are producing for HD consoles. A result of this will be that HD console games will likely be much higher quality on average due to the elimination of smaller projects from less reliable developers, sell more copies because of the lower competition, and have far less variety because HD games are too expensive to take large risks on.

Ultimately, the end result will be a restructuring of the industry that will potentially last a long time ... In the comming generation the decision to make a more graphically modest will (probably) not relate to the platform it is being released on, but will (instead) be focused on keeping the budget at an appropriate level for what the potential sales of the game can justify.

I'm still skeptical if this 1/3 cost or whatever is really just art assets, sure it's a heavy asset but just in terms of scope and scale of the projects they're comparing, I'd say just the size of the game in general. We're compairing stuff like Dead Space / Burnout Paradise / Battlefield Bad Company to MySims, Boom Blox and N-Nerf Strike. I know he said it's not because they're shovalware... but he was hardly going to say otherwise?

Wii developement will always be cheaper but I think the 'third' figure isn't just art assets.

Anywho, the maths stuff at the start of this thread was pretty fail anyway. So many things people forgot, most notably, marketing costs. It's hard to get figures but I read somewhere (Please don't make me find the source lol) EA estimated their Madden advertising at ~ $10 million for the year, and that's just in North America. If Wii games are going to get the advertising people on here slate them for not having, and thus justifying their iffy sales, it's gonna take a huge investiment whether the game cost alot to make or not.

But yeah, so many factors trying to make a good estimate of numbers, retail price, price cuts (more prominent on Wii I'd say...), marketing, market research, production costs blah blah. Wii does work out better value if you can sell more stuff on the console, the question is whether EA are going to be able to do that I guess.

Also quite side note, this EA putting 50% of games on Wii. I assume this is one of those percentages which adds up to over 100%, due to most games being multiplat. i.e. PS3 will get the maddens and fifas and need for speeds too so it'll get something like 40% of EA's games, as well as 360 etc.

No, "poorly" is not a comparison thing. That's the same as claiming a flop is by comparison, but then again CoD Wii got that as well.

Why would I debate that doing a quality HD crossplat title (that's PS3 + 360) costs 3x as much as doing Wii shovelware?

I'm pretty sure I've stated that this is the case, over and over.  Its not "art" that raises costs, its ambition.  Doing more art for an ambitious HD project is what costs more -- it has very little to do with art quality (except in the case of motion capture, which costs a truckload, if you want lots of it).  An ambitious Wii project would also cost a lot more than shovelware does, even if it were shovelware on a HD platform.  The trouble is, there are no ambitious Wii projects, other than those made by Nintendo 1st party studios, really.

EA hasn't done quality for the Wii in the past -- just shovelware.  I'm sure EA, and the other companies, are telling how it is, from this perspetive.  You guys always seem to be trying to suggest that doing a high-quality Wii title costs 1/4th as much as well.  They aren't saying that at all.  They're saying that, on average (read: shovelware), Wii games are cheap to make (read: because they are shovelware).

I'm not at odds with these statements at all.  Crappy software is cheap.  I totally agree.  It makes no difference what the platform is, either.

--EDIT:

Here, let me adjust John's statements to their likely original state, before he went over it and made it "Wii fanboy PC"

" Secondly, development is typically a third to a fourth as much for a shovelware game then it is for a quality game"

 "and that is really a function of the capacity of the hardware and the fact that it is not a high-quality gaming box. So we are not producing, you know, the number of – the amount of art for high-quality games."

...btw, notice how he said "amount of art" and not "quality of art", and also "capacity of hardware" and not "ease of development on the hardware".  It is no more expensive to develop crap on the HDs than it is on the Wii.  The console doesn't matter.  Its the project that makes the difference.

--

As a side note, marketing/advertizing budgets are, of course, the same, no matter what the development platform was.