@Procastinato
I think Rol was being his usual ironic self, there, his point being that companies are losing money left and right. I don't think that they can solve all their economic troubles by developing for the Wii, but certainly a more variegated portfolio seemed to work well enough for Ubisoft.
Anyway, there's a very simple and rational reason for the Wii games being cheaper. The great cost leap between games on xbox and PS2 and nowadays HD games is mostly in the assets production.
Higher def textures, higher detail in models and animations etc. Those are a lot of man-hours that explain the greatly increased costs.
Developing on the Wii will be generally cheaper than on the HD consoles because most of these assets will take less man-hours to be produced. Plus there were also reduced costs with staff training and toolsets because the GC know-how did port almost 100% to wii development, but at this point in time that's a one-time investment most developing studios have certainly done to move to the HD consoles.
In one thing you're right though: if you consider bigger, top tier games less cost differences would apply. Hiring 5 actors and all the tools for 20 hours of motion capture will cost the same whatever console will make use of the data. Same with voice-overs, man-hours spent in testing time, server infrastructures for online gaming etc.
