No question it's going to take some time -- big-budget efforts are generally long-schedule efforts. You can't throw additional programmers and artists at a project and cut its development cycle down significantly, without risking quality. The Wii also didn't initially appear to merit that scale of investment -- now that it's launched and the sales numbers are indicating that it is worthy of support, it will still take time for third-party publishers to catch up. Everyone wants to release something NOW and cash in, of course, which is why we get Rapala Fishing Tournament and Wing Island at the moment.
That said, all else being equal, the SAME degree of epic development SHOULD always cost less on the Wii. The system just doesn't have the memory or hardware to support high-resolution textures and full-blown surround sound design. That means the games don't require the same level of artistic investment, which translates directly into labor savings.
I'm not talking about artistic investment in terms of creativity or aesthetic judgment. I don't mean that games have to look bad on the Wii. They could and should look better than most of what's coming out now. But it takes real time and effort to make the details look good for HD, which means somebody's getting a paycheck to put in that effort. If it takes an artist a day to model and texture a medium-resolution object for the Wii instead of three days to finalize the same object for the HD systems, the difference appropriately results in lower expenditures on the Wii.
I'd much rather see the development budget go into the story and scope of a game than its looks -- and it's arguably cheaper to max out the looks on the Wii than on other systems. I don't have a problem with that. Wii games will soon look better than they do now, guaranteed -- but creating a 1028x1040 resolution wall texture would just be a waste.
