Are wii development costs really cheaper?

[Pristine20]

I hope the topic isn't used for flaming but this is something I'm curious about since my logical brain is yet to understand this concept. Part of this post is spwned from my post in the thread about iD's boss' comments.

Games are made with computers using technology the studio already possess. This is a fixed cost thats already covered except the studio gets additional resources just to make game X. Aside from that, won't the greater cost of develpment be the maintenance of the studio itself? By this, I mean the personnel cost i.e employee wages. Therefore, from my understanding game X would cost around 20 million (add a few extra in case of a borrowed technology and marketing) if 50 employees making $100K/year were working on it for 4 years.

So if game X is your average ps360 game and you switch the team of split the team of 50 into 2 teams of 25 to make 4 wii AAA games instead (each costing 5 mil + marketing costs due to production over a 2 year period) over the 4 year period, does this make wii delopment cheaper/less risky? Assuming game X needs 1 mil sold to break even and the new wii games need 250K to break even, are the wii games guaranteed 250K? It may seem like they are with the mighty wii userbase but remember that even in the ps2 era some great games underperformed even though ps2 had a massive userbase at the time of their release. There is such a thing as market saturation.

If you switch the people who were making ps360 games to wii games, how would there be a significant decrease in cost if these guys don't take a pay cut? Also, since wii games apparently take less time to develop, would these guys always be working on something to justify their paychecks or would they be fired and rehired or are we just going to have lots of studio downsizing as part of the paradigm shift to wii game production because if you think about it, the costs to the publisher are still the same whether it be 1 HD console game of the 4 wii games.

I think we have our current problem because of the # of people it takes to make a great game nowadays. Unless a lot of these people are laid off, I don't think game development would be cheaper regardless of what platform you develop for.

Someone please correct me if I'm off because I still don't understand exactly why wii development would be much cheaper. I hope my rant is understandable...I hardly ever create threads lol.