A lot of people seem to have taken my talk of investment as meaning big budget. That's not necessarily the case. Many of Nintendo's projects have had large budgets, to be sure, but many have also had small budgets. I doubt Fire Emblem and Warioland were expensive to make, and certainly a lot of WiiWare games didn't cost much, but I bet they've turned a good profit. Wii Play has earned massive amounts of revenue for how much it must have cost.
The point is that the size of the return correlates to the size of the investment. A publisher which spends $20 million on a single Wii project will likely see similar returns as another publisher who invests $20 million in four Wii projects. But the volume of money invested in any size of Wii project still hasn't rivaled the huge investments made in HD gaming, except from that one publisher who's making all the money.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
