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

[NJ5]

MaxwellGT2000 said:

Procrastinato said:

Khuutra said:

Procrastinato said:
The "because of HD graphics" is pretty vague statement. Gears 2 cost $10M to develop. Lots of people claim it has some of the X360's best graphics.

Almost every Wii game in existance probably derived from a pre-existing GameCube engine, since the architectures are next to identical, outside of clock -- so how did Gears 2 get so cheap?

I'm not calling your honesty into question here, but could you source that? I'm really curious, now.

It's pretty easy to find.  Here's the first thing I came up with in Google:

link 

My point was to illustrate that 3rd parties were comparing re-used engines (GameCube engines, which are basically Wii engines) to brand new PS3/360 engines, when those "1/4th to 1/3rd" quotes were made.  That's no longer the case.

That wasn't that long ago, around the time you made your new account after Groucho was banned for you trying to refute that claim from EAs own mouth.

During the summer they also made the claims that most HD games take 1.1 million copies sold on average to break even, again not that long ago, funny how the quote you use is from Epic games, which as others posted that was the cost taking out the cost of the engine, which is also one of the most used engines on HD consoles with royalties paid to Epic games for its use. 

And not to call your realiability into question but you claim "that's no longer the case" but I really can't just take your word for it after some of your previous claims you've yet to back up with evidence and facts... so in short, instead of just claiming something and finding random google links, can you show me something that proves "that's no longer the case" its only been a year since EA made that claim, and about 6 months since the 1.1 million claim, and they're one of the biggest in the business with a lot more clout so than some random forum guy.  Especially after 2009 saw so many developers making HD games go under, which also happened in 2008.

 

I agree with everything you wrote, I'll just add that I never understood Groucho's/Procrastinato's focus on the engine part when discussing costs. Engine LICENSING costs may play a significant part, but those would exist both for old and new engines, and no way they would triple the costs of distributing/developing a game.

But more importantly, tons of developers mention the graphics as the real reason for the cost. The current standard of PS3 and 360 games requires a lot of attention to detail from artists, and this costs time and money.