@Joelcool7
I don't think the numbers are as clearcut as you see them. For example you quote $30 million for EA Canada and $4 million for Bandai Namco without mentioning advertising budgets, licensing fees (console manufacturers and intellectual property owners), cost of goods, etc. Not only that but the $4 million quoted for Bandai Namco is outrageously low considering that advertising costs alone for the average next generation game is well over $4 million dollars alone.
Here's a chart from an article that talks about the costs of games on next generation consoles compared to previous ones:
Average Game Budgets
Source: http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/advertorial/?id=12089
Ok I'm going to make two assumptions before I begin and that is that the cost of game development for the Wii is the same as on the PS2-Xbox-GCN (I feel that's being extremely favorable to the Wii considering I suspect it's actually a little higher) and I'm going to assume everything else (advertising budget, cost of goods, etc) would be the same for the company regardless of what console they're making the game for.
So we have a game that cost $25,000,000 total on a Xbox 360 and $18,000,000 on the Wii (Since I'm assuming the Wii's average development costs are the same as the PS2-Xbox-GCN generation). Now using that chart they would have to sell 1,086,957 on the Xbox 360 to break even and 782,608 on the Wii to break even (using the blended Worldwide Wholesale Price point). Now on the surface it appears that the average Wii game has an advantage but you'll see how that actually disappears. If you take a look at the average price that an Xbox 360 game sells for you'll see that it's on average $10 more than it's Wii counterpart so adding that into the equation it would require 757,576 sales Worldwide to break even. Not only is that smaller than the Wii's but it also means that every game sold after it passes it's break even mark actually makes $10 more than every Wii game sold after it's passes it's break even point which adds to the advantage.
Of course things aren't always clearcut and some games that would sell well on the Xbox 360 may not sell as well as on the Wii and vice-versa. Also the company has to look at the competition on a given console and of the three Nintendo has the strongest first party based on total sales of their games. The installed base is also a major factor in the decision making process.
Also all of this doesn't take into account Microsoft and Sony's downloadable content for games which adds more money into developer's pockets sometimes (take a look at Need For Speed Carbon, you could pay for additional cars for it on Xbox Live, what they didn't tell you is that the cars are *already* on the dvd and don't actually have to be downloaded, basically a person is paying for something that is already there). What's to stop developers from planning downloadable content from the get-go and then basically just taking a part of the finished game and charging for it (sleezy I know but as pointed out EA has done that at least once).
Anyways hopefully I got my point across about why game budgets for different consoles and profits based on the number of games sold isn't as clear cut as it would seem on the surface.
(oops sorry Joelcool7 I completely misread your post, I'm not sure why they're being cheapskates I suspect the reason why games don't take advantage of the system as much as they should it because a lot of developers were caught with their pants down, they assumed the PS3 was going to quickly take number one and it would be business as usual, so they had to rush to get their games out on the Wii).
