First of all he is using a one year old article to bash the wii and excludes information from the original article that assummes that the average wii game costs 25 000 000:

Wii titles, depending on their status, typically bring publishers between £13 and £27 per unit, so a million units would equate to anything between £13 million and £27 million in generated revenue. The New York Times suggests that the cost of games development is typically around $25 million (£17.52million),

http://www.totalvideogames.com/Nintendo-Wii/news/Wii-Development-Costs-Highlight-Spiralling-Crisis-13918.html

Flawed article and assumptions and cherypicking is not something to put your trust in

This is the worst and misinformed sales article I've ever read.

yea, the amount of 3rd party wii games that cost $25 million to develop is a really short list.  The only game that comes to mind that would cost that much is Monster Hunter 3 and that has already sold over a million and had subscription fees. 

^ This.

The article he is quoting is a March 31 2009 article that is based on a New York Times article, that assumes Wii games cost $ 25 million. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Even worse (if it can be any worse) to show how bad things are, "The New York Times cites NPD figures that suggest only 16 out of 468 Wii titles have achieved this landmark". So, not only do they quote a figure totally unconnected to reality, they then check NPD numbers, which are US only  , to determine which games passed the million mark. I would find this hilarious if such articles didn't create actual damage.

I'd really like to see the according figures for HD games...

It's a nice coincidence that the maths works out so neatly. Over a million profit. Under million, no profit. I wonder how the HD consoles would fair under such logic.

I found the original NYT article - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/technology/30game.html . It doesn't say Wii games cost $25 million, it says:

"The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was perhaps $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is well more than twice that — $25 million is typical and it can be much more, industry executives said.

Games sell for about $60, but the sales of most games do not come close to covering development costs or the additional costs of licensing fees to the console makers, marketing and the merchants’ cut.

The industry might be in better shape if it could sell a million copies of each title. But the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies."

Note that all the above is talking about games in general, not the Wii.

Apparently (if he wasn't misquoted), Reggie did tell the NYT in one interview at that time (March 2009) that publishers of games for its Wii console needed to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but frankly that didn't add up (and there were alot of discussions to that effect) and he also said that was a lower threshold than for the other consoles.

This is just a rehashing a year old interview with a lot of cherry picking, false premises and mostly false facts.

I don't think games like My Horse and Me, G-Force, Up, Karaoke Joysound Wii, Hooked! Real Motion Fishing, New Play Control, Rapala, M&M Kart Racing, and a bunch of other games have to hit 1 million to take profit. Sure they need to hit no more than 20.000 to make profit, and in fact they don't deserve it.

By the way, 79 games hit 1M in Wii, but, for example in PS3 there are only 54 games that hit 1M and sure it costs a lot more develop a game for PS3.

Very interesting post, thank you.

We are talking averages here. Of course some games under 1M could have make some profit while others over 1M could
have not.

The important point is the trend, the figures are not accurate.

What do we call profit? games making more money than the costs some one would say? counting on a discount rate? of how much?

Instead of looking for very precise figures, i think analyzing the average trend is a good overview of what is happening.

If Wii games take a million to make a profit... HD games would take what... 3-4 Million? I gotta think reggie was hilariously misquoted.