Why do most third party publishers ignore the Wii completely ?

[Scoobes]

Wow 16 page thread, some people really are bitter about the lack of quality on Wii this gen (excepting 1st party). I would ask people to try and think of this completely neutrally from the perspective of a 3rd party publisher.

A 3rd-party core game is released (some effort required by dev- approx. $10million budget) and sells reasonably well with little to no advertising on Wii and the publisher/dev thinks "not bad, could be better, some decent returns on investment". Same 3rd-party publisher releases casual/cheap game with no effort (say $4-5million budget tops) with no advertising and that game sells a similar amount perhaps a bit more, perhaps a bit less. Publisher makes a good profit and thinks "Hey, we can bring out games for little investment and it sells! We're making some decent money, more than the games we release for the core market!".

On the HD consoles this is harder to do as they don't have that same large and diverse market the Wii does so they have to put in more effort on visuals, tech etc. to get sales. Also, you have the fact that HD games can come out on 3 platforms with minimal porting effort required. A Wii port would require a large effort and investment for minimal returns.

Take Assassin's Creed. Why would Ubisoft release it on Wii. On the HD consoles (and PC for that matter) combined you can port it/ share art assets etc. so the total cost is say $25million for about 5million combined sales. Port it to Wii you may get an extra 1-2million, but the porting/dev costs would mean about an extra $7-8million. Ubisoft probably saw it as not worth it.

3rd party games can sell on Wii, it's just that publishers can already make money with minimal investment. It's sad, but considering the core games on Wii, I fear it's true.