AAA Wii third-party support on the way, says Capcom community specialist

[Ail]

HappySqurriel said:

Ail said:
Ok so every week we get explained how it is cheaper and faster to develop for the Wii yet all over this thread people quote development times for Wii AAA titles that are equal to HD consoles AAA development times...

So which is which ?
Is it only cheaper and faster to develop shovelware on the Wii, but the real games take as long to make as those on HD consoles or what ?

I don't think anyone has said that it takes the same ammount of time to produce a game on a HD console as it does to produce a similar game for the Wii. Now, with that said ...

Developing for the Wii is very similar in many ways to developing for the PS2/XBox/Gamecube, and it wasn't that uncommon for games to take 18 to 24 months to develop for a development team of 40 to 60 people; in extreme cases the development teams ballooned to 100 people, or the game took 30 months to complete, which expanded the development budget to (roughly) $20 Million.

In order to get a game on the scale as the big budget games of the previous generation (Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid) a Wii game would still take around 2 years to develop; where their PS3 counterparts take 3 years or more, using a much larger development team.

Edit: Remember that games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Gran Turismo 5 all have development teams well above 100 people (some even have been rumored to be close to 200 people) and have taken close to 3 years (or more) to develop.

And the developers were alreading hyping the games with conceptual art and stuff 6 months into the developement..

So why aren't developers currently working on Wii AAA titles not hyping them ?

Answer : because they aren't