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Degausser on 14 January 2011
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RolStoppable said:
Degausser said:

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.

I didn't mean to imply that a PSP to Wii port costs nothing at all, but the costs are minimal compared to an entirely new game. It has been established that porting a game from one HD console to another only adds about 10 % to the original costs of development and nothing suggests that a PSP to Wii port would be more costly than that, especially because the base cost you are working with is much lower (say 2m for a PSP game and 10m for an HD game).

Essentially, with a PSP to Wii port you are looking at a game that can already profit, if it sells just 200-300k units. A low risk considering the size of the Wii userbase and the sales numbers mentioned in this thread all exceed this value.


 Well you're going to have to find me a link, or something to back this up, as all estimates of costs suggest that a PSP game costs ~ $500k to develope, whereas a Wii game is a minimum of ~$1.5m and often goes beyond ~$4m. 

 

A 2008 system comparison analysis by Ubisoft

Leading on from this, an Ubisoft executive gave a breakdown of the company's average development costs per game - with a DS title costing between 500,000 to 1,000,000 euros ($785,000-$1.57m), PS3/Xbox 360/PC titles averaging 12 million to 18 million euros ($18.8m-$28.2m) to create for all 3 SKUs, and a Wii game expected to cost 5 million to 6 million euros ($7.8-$9m) to develop.[4]

I think you're underestimating the rise in budget by going from PSP developement to PSP/Wii developement and that the budget will infact at the very least, triple. Whether they didn't feel extending it to Wii developement was financially viable or it simply required more resources then Blackrock had I think it's clear why some of these PSP versions of games are popping up, and why they're not on the Wii.