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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Wii game budgets 1/4 of HD budgets according to EA

celine on 04 February 2009
Erik Aston said:
World at War has not been a huge success on Wii. The game was pretty heavily advertised with a Wii-specific TV commercial. TV ain't cheap.

If it creeps to 1m sales, that's great, but all this sketchy math doesn't make it a huge success even then.

Yep.

It is the same problem EA encoutered this year with Madden 09. Simply alot of the potential buyers of those franchieses have already a PS3 or 360  ( they were previously on PS2 and Xbox ) .

Who remains ? Wii only  consumers that want enough the product to buy a dumbed down version. 

The same it is true but on reverse and without the dumb down factor for the music genre.



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HappySqurriel on 04 February 2009

Ignore Groucho's comments about shovelware because he (clearly) has no concept of what real shovelware is ...

Shovelware games tend to be amazingly low budget, low quality games that are (often) based off of popular licences like Deal or No Deal or 1 vs 100 on the Nintendo DS. The entire marketing strategy of these games is to (basically) make a game which is easy to sell to retailers in high enough volumes that you recover your development costs and turn a healthy profit off of the initial shipment.



sethnintendo on 04 February 2009

I am just saying that some publishers like Sega and a few others are actually trying to produce decent games for Wii (wasn't implying that Sega was producing these games very cheaply more like the other way around that they are actually investing more money). Sure the 3rd party support hasn't been the best for the Wii. I was trying to state that Sega was investing a decent amount of money and time into Madworld and The Conduit. Sure it cost less if you make crap shovelware but soon 3rd parties will probably invest more money into the Wii. My only guess is that the cost will go up on the Wii if they aren't making a shovelware game.



Groucho on 04 February 2009
sethnintendo said:
I am just saying that some publishers like Sega and a few others are actually trying to produce decent games for Wii (wasn't implying that Sega was producing these games very cheaply more like the other way around that they are actually investing more money). Sure the 3rd party support hasn't been the best for the Wii. I was trying to state that Sega was investing a decent amount of money and time into Madworld and The Conduit. Sure it cost less if you make crap shovelware but soon 3rd parties will probably invest more money into the Wii. My only guess is that the cost will go up on the Wii if they aren't making a shovelware game.

I agree completely.  My main issue with some of the posters in this thread is that they try to peddle this statistical information as if it were a good thing for the Wii, and an "advantage" the Wii has over the HD consoles.  

In fact, its the main reason the Wii has such terrible 3rd party products to date.  The 3rd party publishers only spend 1/3rd to 1/4th the amount of money on a Wii title that they do on a HD crossplat.  The titles you mentioned are likely some of the first notable exceptions, and in the future, the "Wii is cheap" argument won't hold water -- heck it doesn't now.

 



--OkeyDokey-- on 04 February 2009

It really depends on the size of the team more than anything. LittleBigPlanet's budget was a third of Super Mario Galaxy's (5-6 million compared to 16 million).



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Khuutra on 04 February 2009
--OkeyDokey-- said:
It really depends on the size of the team more than anything. LittleBigPlanet's budget was a third of Super Mario Galaxy's (5-6 million compared to 16 million).

Where did you get those figures? I can never find this sort of thing.



jammy2211 on 04 February 2009
HappySqurriel said:
jammy2211 said:
HappySqurriel said:
jammy2211 said:
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.

For the most part it is just for the added artwork ...

One part of it is that graphical assets require more work to produce the added detail and to produce the data necessary for the texture effects, another part of it is that the same environments require more assets to be produced so they don't look as barren, and you also need to produce even more artistic assets because people are more likely to notice repetition.

Basically, the closer you get to having individual items match reality the more you need your environments to match reality to preserve immersion in the game. While walking into an office with a desk, chair, computer and trash can worked really well on the Playstation it would seem amazingly barren if it was the environment in a PS3 game ... At the same time, if the desk used at a loading dock was the same as the desk used for the CEO few people would notice on the N64, and it would stick out like a sore thumb on an XBox 360 game.

 

 I don't see how people can think it's just added art, and if it is, the type of game still governs the amount of art work you're going to spend on. Something like Burnout or Dead Space are in these vast open environments, they're huge epic games with a large scope, of course art costs more, partly cause it's HD, partly due to the nature of the game.

 Making something like Boom Blox on PS360 wouldn't cost anywhere near as much as a Dead Space or Mass Effect, and equally making a game with the scope of Dead Space on the Wii would cost alot more then most of EA's 'lesser title' range. Wii is cheaper due to art assets, anyone who denies that is an idiot, however whether it's the governing factor or because the very nature of most Wii games is that they'll be cheaper, I'm not so sure.

 EA need to make more Wii games, everyone does, i'm just not sure what sort of games these are really going to be, albeit I'm sure most of them won't appeal to me.

 

You're right, Making Boom Blox or MySims for the HD consoles probably wouldn't cost nearly as much as a game like Dead Space but (at the same time) these games also don't cost nearly as much to develop as games that are similar to Dead Space or Burnout cost to develop for the Wii ... and they would cost several times as much to develop for HD consoles if they decided to make the artistic assets take advantage of the hardware available.

 

Now, there has always been the option to not take advantage of the hardware available (after all, there were several low budget 2D games on the PS2 which were similar to NeoGeo games) but this is not a very viable strategy on the HD consoles because people bought those systems primarily because of their graphical capabilities.

 

 

 That's pretty much what I'm saying.

 The point being, there is the option on the Wii to skimp on the graphics, cut out some of the scope and release a 'lesser' game because they can get away with it. Why spend $8 million developing a Wii game when you can develope it for half that? Would it sell more? Would it sell double? Third parties seem to think the answer to this question is 'no' and I don't think anyone can really answer that question, even with proper sales figures avaliable.

 



Arius Dion on 04 February 2009

Wait..Lower dev costs IS an advantage the Wii has over the HD twins....



Bet between Slimbeast and Arius Dion about Wii sales 2009:


If the Wii sells less than 20 million in 2009 (as defined by VGC sales between week ending 3d Jan 2009 to week ending 4th Jan 2010) Slimebeast wins and get to control Arius Dion's sig for 1 month.

If the Wii sells more than 20 million in 2009 (as defined above) Arius Dion wins and gets to control Slimebeast's sig for 1 month.

Groucho on 04 February 2009
Soriku said:

Munkeh said from a mag he read, LBP costed 2-3 mil not 5-6. And that SMG figure sounds too off.

I've also heard from several sources that SMG cost 16-17 mil USD.  Super Mario 64 supposedly cost 30 mil USD.  Nintendo, unlike the 3rd party publishers, doesn't skimp on supporting their own console.

2-3M for LBP seems low though.

 



outlawauron on 04 February 2009

Comparing the budgets of EA's Wii game and EA's HD games, I'm not surprised.


Boom Blox and Dead Space have to have quite a difference in budget.



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