Reggie says most Wii games can make a profit with under a million sold.

[Joelcool7]

I remember when Wii dev kits were distributed NamcoBandai said a big budget Wii game would cost about 4-mill to develope. Now I'm sure that the price has risen in some cases. However theirs no doubt that a Wii game can be developed for about 4-5 mill or even cheaper. It also doesn't take nearly as long to develope a Wii title. Alot of those shovel ware games are probubly developed for as little as a couple hundred thousand to a mill by recycling the engine and sound effects and in some cases level design and character design.

I'd say my best guess would be a medium budget Wii title breaking into profitability after 200,000 copies sold. According to Patcher the publisher makes up to 36$ per title and I'm guessing Wii would be about ten dollars less so that is 26$ per copy. Doing the math you make more then 4-mill when you sell 200,000 copies.

Now we know bigger titles like The Conduit were used to bring us new technologies. Now The Conduit may have cost more then 4-mill to develope I don't know maybe as high as 8-9. However it sold over 300,000 copies so it would have made over 6-million in reveniew. However HighVoltage is using the engine recycled for The Conduit 2, Grinder and Tournament of Legends. These titles will make more then enough money to compensate for lower then hoped Wii sales.

That being said budget titles can be made really quickly and appeal to a vast audience. You can flop a couple budget titles (Shovelware) then one is a mediocre hit and suddenly you've broken even or profited.

However I think big budget games like RedSteel2 will fail to break even. Then again UbiSoft said they'd consider it a success if it sold more then 500,000 that would generate 10-mill or more in reveniew!