| Kasz216 said: That's another reason why companies on the Wii are doing better i'd imagine. "Analysis" is vague afterall. Perhaps it's just from their studios and past SCEE knowledge? |
This was the case long before the Wii even existed. I would wager that the Wii actually makes the problem worse -- you can't risk large dev costs on the Wii with so much shovelware competition and an untargetable (i.e. general) audience, but at the same time, it takes a reasonably large cost to create a decent game in the first place. If 3rd parties actually do up the Wii budgets from the 25-50% of the HD budgets that they are now, their risk will go up even moreso.
25%-50% budget for Wii titles doesn't mean they are the same quality of title as a typical HD title. A shovelware game on the Wii costs 25% what a AAA game on a HD console might take, but the potential profit margins are not necessarily better (yet).
Publishers have been playing this ugly gambling game since the mid-90s. 30% is actually an improvement over what it was then. Its the blockbusters that make money and save publishing companies -- hence the increasing budgets of games over the years, and the willingness to risk more, while upping the bar and bringing the games industry to its current state -- anything under about $8-10 million USD is a "budget" title. Most AAA games cost $15-20 million. Wii games tend to cost $2-$5 million, but we're talking shovelware. THe AAA Wii games cost nearly as much as the HD AAA titles do.
This same trend is the major reason a number of genres on the PC have died over the past decade, and now only exist in semi-professional forms from "low cost" development studios (often in Eastern Europe) -- namely flight sims, space combat sims, and many forms of WRPGs. The revenue was never great enough to justify the expense of making these titles in modern-day form.
