Is Epic Mickey a lesson to third parties?

[Degausser]

RolStoppable said:

Degausser said:

 I know what you're saying, but this isn't a one off in Disney's case and so I'm leading myself to believe that there must be more of a reason that these games hit the PSP and not Wii. You said it yourself, publishers happily ported some PS2 / PSP games, so why not these ones? There must be more of a reason then simply because they hate the Wii or something - and I'm trying to reason that. 

 From what I've seen, with alot of the titles on every platform like movie tie ins, the Wii / PS2 / PSP version is often develoepd by an entirely different studio to the PS3 / 360 / PC. Thus my logic is whereas a small team of people at Blackrock can get a PSP version up and running on minimal budget - to make an SD version which runs on the console would require more people, more money and as shown in other instances may require the hiring of another studio altogether. 

 So my guess is whereas 'downscaling' from PS2 / Wii to PSP is cheap and easy, maybe going the other way isn't? I don't really know enough about game technology to say so can anyone with a better knowledge help? I'm going off what I read and see, and while lots of Wii / PS2 games appear on PSP, I can't think of many previous PSP exclusives going in the opposite direction - aside from a few Sony games which were likely developed with the plan for porting all along.

 Publisher like money, and if putting these PSP games on the Wii was as easy as you let on, then they'd port them just like they did with the various PS2 ports at launch and whatever else.

Downscaling requires additional work (for example: drawing textures new, decreasing polygon counts of character models and objects to keep the framerate at an acceptable level) while putting the same exact game on a more powerful platform does not. Of course there is the option to improve textures and models when porting to a more powerful system, but it's no requirement to make the game work in the first place.

Publishers like money, but that doesn't mean they can't make decisions that leave money on the table and PSP versions of HD games that see no Wii ports are simply mindboggling, because the usual excuse for "HD multiplatform, but not Wii" has been that creating SD assets would require too much additional work. The other prominent excuse was "third party games don't sell well on the Wii", but that would apply even moreso for the PSP. That's why it's hard to see any business sense involved in these PSP games, unless the plan of third parties is to deliberately lock out the Wii and propel up other platforms that they rather want to see the market ruling.

All the publishers have ported lots of games to the Wii already, so why not these ones? There has to be a reason other then an attempt to 'lock out' the Wii as well, they've all ported games to the thing before, not every publisher would do it and they all make exclusives for the console. 

 I don't think either of us know enough about game developement to really say what can and cant be done easily - however all articles I've found regarding this of thing point towards my idea that doing a PSP game alone is simply cheaper and faster. The two linked below both have PSP developement cited as much cheaper then Wii developement, which could easily explain why these games (Which would off of sales date both be poised to sell roughly the same on Wii and PSP) are only financially viable on the cheaper costing PSP.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/36428/3DS-dev-costs-mirror-Wii-equivalent

http://www.watchmojo.com/blog/video_games/2010/11/22/3ds-game-development-cost-comparable-with-wii/

 It also destroys this idea that a PSP game simply be ported to the Wii for no cost, as well otherwise the Wii dev costs would be equal to that of the PSP as people would just make a Wii game for the PSP and then port it :P.

 The only example i can remember of a PSP game being ported to the Wii was that MEdal of Honour: Heroes 2 game. It had an extra game mode or something, but the port still took EA 4 months from announcement to come out, hardly an insignificient investment of time and money.