Are wii development costs really cheaper?

[Pristine20]

Zucas said:
On average, to develop for the Wii hardware, it is going to be cheaper. That's just fact. But how much cheaper varies. It depends on time of development, number of people working, and the style of the game. It takes less money to make a game like No More Heroes than Red Steel simply on style.

In general Wii development is naturally cheaper but depending on the game, effort, and time can really vary of how much cheaper it is. For the most part, Red Steel had the production values of an "HD" game as ya'll like to call it.

 

I don't see how just the wii hardware would be intrinsically cheaper to develop for. I just can't imagine singstar being cheaper than SMG. I think what costs money is the salaries of the people working on x game and therefoe the time they spend working on it. Ps3 hardware is supposedly difficult to work around so I'd think it's ecxpensive games would be that way because people don't know what they are doing yet (hence they take longer development cyclesmeaning more time a person is paid to work on ps3 games) as opposed to a wii game since the wii uses GC architecture which is already known. Technology used i.e licensing new engines may add an external factor to cost but if it is an in-house engine then it's really just more employee hours spent making the engine.

However for a company like Insomniac, would a wii AAA game be significantly cheaper than ps3 when they haven't worked with the wii/GC architecture before, have no engine to use for it and their employees get paid the same to work on the game (this is assuming the game is also SMG quality because my OP assumed bloom blox-type titles)?