| LordTheNightKnight said: But with the Wii, AAA is 5 to 10 million in costs. |
The typical Wii title costs that much, but that doesn't qualify it as "AAA". Engineering expenses on Wii titles are generally cheaper -- although frankly, on good Wii titles, they're still going to be pretty high (much higher than 5-10 mil for the average Wii shovelware title). Fitting a good engine onto a smaller/less powerful platform takes talent and manpower, just like utilizing a high-end platform to its fullest does. Engineering expenses, however, are only a small portion of the development costs of a game.
Designers aren't going to change in price -- if you want a large, ambitious "AAA" title, you need a bunch of good designers to create it, no matter what the platform is. For that matter, if you want to fit your title well into the smaller space that the Wii represents, you need designers who are technically savvy... and they cost more.
You might save a couple bucks on artists... except that, again, you're going to need higher quality, experienced technical artists to do good work on the Wii, where there's more room for "sloppy" (its true) work on the HD consoles. Its easy to create meshes and textures that are waaay too big to have at runtime in a game. Making them reasonable, and still having them look good -- that's what you pay good technical artists for. The Wii is definately the most difficult platform to do good art for, merely due to its limitations -- if your art design is really good, you can get around this fairly easily... but good art designers cost more $ too, and it limits your art direction options and even your game design.
In short Wii titles are cheaper, because the designs are less ambitious. Not because the Wii is somehow magically easier to develop games for. Wii games are cheaper because they focus on designs that are only slightly more ambitious than "last gen" titles, or because they focus on designs that will easily fit onto both the Wii and the PS2, for maximum potential profit. The fact that your average Wii game only costs 5-10 million USD is noto a statement about the Wii, but rather a statement about how much publishers are willing to throw at a Wii game -- and its the primary reason why you just don't see many "AAA" titles on the Wii. They really are not "AAA" from the development perspective, they never had to budget to be "AAA" to begin with. The only publisher willing to throw AAA-sized budgets at lots of Wii games is Nintendo itself... and the result is clear -- awesome games on the Wii.
If the 3rd-party publishers would commit to throwing that much money at a Wii title, you'd start seeing some really impressive Wii games, plain and simple. Because they believe that only 5 million will create a profitable game "for the masses" (and they're correct, for the most part), however, they don't seem to be willing to take the risk on bigger titles.
So yes, the Wii does indeed "lack 3rd party support", not in terms of quantity (# of titles), but in terms of quality (money spent per title). With that, I'd like to point out that there is NO good reason for the 3rd party publishers to do that at this point in the Wii's life cycle -- and it looks like they are, indeed, starting to spend money on Wii games (MH3, DQ9, etc.), so this lack of 3rd party quality should be a temporary thing only.
