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Reasonable said:

I'm sure they do - at least right now anyway.  Last gen and before each playstation was so dominant a developer could confidently produce a game for it and not worry about other consoles.  Now though the Wii is dominant but has very different tech from PS3/360, while PS3/360 sell the big third party titles better but apart from a few core franchises its clear most HD games need to be on both or essentially half their sales.

So you can go Wii and its low cost but there's a lot of competition to succed, much of it from Nintendo themselves.  Or you can go HD and spread your risk over two consoles unless you want to go exclusive and get whatever perks you can for the privilage.  Or you can go HD then downscale for Wii (possible but I suspect not a good idea).  Or you can go SD then invest a lot more into new HD content to take the game to PS3/360 (which is also possible but adds a lot of expense).

Demographics would be more about the type of game - for example would you release a Gears of War type game on Wii alone?  I wouldn't as the market demographics and current systems indicate the 360/PS3 each have far better demographics for that type of game.

It's no accident PS3/360 top titles are very similar (exclusives aside) while Wii's are totally different exclusives you don't see on the HD consoles.

There may be more examples but only Lego games (Star Wars, Indy, etc) seem to lend themselves well to full multi-platform support from what I can see.

 

 

 

 

It's sounding more and more like it's not *exactly* an HD vs SD console issue.  From what I'm reading it's a combination of factors:

1. HD vs SD - porting considerations going in both directions, cost of HD vs SD development

2. User demographics - casual vs hardcore

3. Installed base

It's makes sense to say that getting more companies to bite the HD development costs can work for PS3/360 and against Wii, but I'm not sure the user-base is who needs to be convinced as much as the developers.  The problem in Japan is that the Wii is already so far out in front.