@Groucho: Let's start from character models, according to Kazunori Yamauchi, cars in GT5 are made from 200 000 polygons on average, as opposed to 4 000 in GT4. And how was it, it took a week from one guy to program a car to GT4 and a month to GT5.
And the same goes for evinronments; the better looking evinronment, the more it cost to make.
And more programmable features you have, the more expensive it is to use them.
Look, the developement costs have already gone up from last gen. Compare what the games cost to make in 2000-2003 and what they cost in 2005-2008.
What you were suggesting earlier, was programming a constrained system. If we go by system power in relation to available memory, 360 and PS3 seem to be more constrained than Wii in that aspect, assuming they are at least ten times as powerful as Wii.
As for Super Mario 64, it was delayed a few times due Miyamoto thinking the wasn't good enough, so it raised the costs and N64 happened to be a tricky system to program due to its bottlenecks. Wii has a better design and it should be easy to program for (at least that was the hardware focus with GC design) and someone mentioned somewhere that SMG would have cost 14 million to make (of course, i don't know whether it's true or not, just like the 30 million on SM64).
Anyway, another thing what you said was, that the game developement on HD consoles is as cheap as it on Wii, if the games have Wiis visual quality. That's not the case with most of the HD games, atleast the ones that are supposed to sell on PS360 and the manufacturers requirements are somewhat above Wiis capabilities, so there goes that argument.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
