Is a dowloadable title actually less risk then a retail release?

[Joelcool7]

Well Rol D21lewis did thoroughly read my OP. You obviously didn't read his first few sentences.

I take the idea of cost from other developer statements. Recently I have heard 400,000 is the standard development costs for a small iOS professional game. Nintendo 3DS is a much more expensive platform to develop for. Now considering Nintendo is the publisher development costs would have been cheaper then a third party developer. However the costs would have still been higher then an iOS game. I'd estimate Rolling Western probably cost near a million USD maybe 800k. The studio is a professional bigger budget studio and the game is beautiful it could have been improved a bit with a bigger budget but it is pretty dang good.

The sales of 25,000 first month is impressive for download on 3DS, but how poorly could it have possibly done at retail? A poorly selling game still does around what 10k their is no way the title could have done much worse then it is currently doing on eShop.

I can see how eShop is lower risk for a low budget downloadable title developed by a Indie studio who can't bring it to consoles. But for a standard budget from a big publisher like Nintendo or even UbiSoft or EAGames. It doesn't make sense for a title big enough for retail to be launched on eShop. It does not make sense to risk losing tons of money by launching on eShop.