"Wii Third-Party Struggles Highlighted by May NPD" - GameDaily

[Bodhesatva]

FishyJoe said:

Bodhesatva said:

Because more money is made per game sold.

Each 360 game costs 60 dollars. Of the 10 additional dollars per game, about 4-5 of it goes to publishers (2-3 goes to MS/Sony, as their royalty fees are higher. Another 2-3 goes to retailers, who get a larger share of the profits).

So if publishers are making 4-5 dollars more per game, that's an additional 4-5 million dollars per 1 million copies sold. The more a game sells, the more additional revenue is accrued from the increased cost of each copy. At 5 million copies, you're at 20-25 million additional revenue; at CoD4-level sales of 10 million, you're at 40-50 million additional revenue that simply would not exist if it were a Wii game.

In short, a game that sells 10 million copies would need to cost ~40 million less to develop to make more money on the Wii; that's a conservative estimate. As such, it's reasonable to assume that the giant, AAA games like CoD, Assassin's Creed, Gears of War and Halo make more money on the PS3/360 than they do on the Wii.

I'd say a developer is lucky to get 1/3 revenue out of the retail price, so I think your dollar analysis seems unreasonably high.

Also, you're skimming the best selling games and not averaging in all games. Read my sig. Without factoring in all cases, you simply cannot say that average or total profitability is higher or lower.

Finally, you're ignoring the cases of multi-platform development where the Wii is included, such as GHII, Lego Star Wars and RE4, where development on the Wii contributed significantly to sales.

I think my analysis is conservative, but neither of us has actual figures. 

And we started the conversation by talking about the top sellers; that's where this conversation began, that the 5+ million sellers make more money on the PS3/360. The whole discussion was framed like this in the first place. I agree, the lower sellers make a great deal more money on the Wii.

As for the last point, I absolutely agree, but it's anathema to the conversation. Obviously the most money can be made by a game that sells well across all 3 platforms; I believe we're discussing the companies that make a choice between PS3/360 and Wii, but not everything. Heck, some games (Madden, GH, Need for Speed) also include the DS, PSP, and PS2.