Third Party Devs have made up their minds about the Wii.

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Demotruk said:

Johann said:

Demotruk said:

Oh, and my point about break out hits being the vast bulk of Wii sales is true. Of the 1500 or so Wii games, and the total 436.84 million Wii software sales, 302.72 million belong to the roughly 50 million sellers.

Sorry, I missed that post.

2 things:

1) - How many of those are 3rd party? Because Nintendo's software must count for a lot of that.

2) - Compare that to the HD consoles and if it's ridiculously out of proportion, I'll admit that I was wrong and you win the argument.

 

1) Roughly the top 80 third party (those that hit 500K, easier to calculate) games out of ~1,450 third party Wii games make up 129.22 Million sales of the 170 million total sales of Wii third party games. So it is similarly top heavy.

2) I'm not sure I understand why, as I don't agree with your judgment of "support", but here goes (360 only because I don't want to spend too much time counting):

I'm not sure how many X360 third party games there are, but we'll go with 800. I know it's much less than Wii as a raw number. Out of 277Mill sales for third party 360 games, 217Mill are made by the top 152 games that reach 500K. If you reduce that to the top 80, it should be around 165Mill (rough calculation). Whatever way you look at it, you get a much higher proportion of games for 360 that have enough effort put into them to reach a benchmark like 500K.

HD graphics alone require an exponentially larger amount of man-hours to design the art, which creates exponentially larger development costs.  And all of a sudden, 500K sales isn't even profitable.  EA wasn't even happy with Dead Space, which broke a million sales and had its own cartoon.