1/2. From memory, but I was mistaken / I cannot find where I saw it. I saw a recent VGC article quoting pachter about the average sale price on the titles and that price was higher than what I remember but its more concrete.

3. I subtracted hardware bundles where 3rd parties couldn't be competitive. So Wii Sports / Wii Sports resort and WIi play are unique bundles and not counted, however Wii Fit is inclusive given the fact that Wii Fit competitors have been reasonably successful. This leaves the Wii ahead slightly but on the balance of downloadable games I figure that it would even out roughly. This isn't accurate as the total software sold/would have been sold, its my trying to look at how the third party publishers might read the market.

4.Its simply easier to deal with the variable costs than the fixed costs. Things like packaging, royalties, distribution, retailer margins etc are very well defined costs. You can easily get a source for those. However fixed costs are not easy to quantify and a lot of it depends on interpretation. Does a Wii game also have to pay for the 5 cancelled projects the production house has on hold because they rushed to follow trends and always fell behind the 8-ball for instance?

Its not that I want to deliberately ignore the production cost side of things. I just cannot think of how to include such a complicated aspect in what ought to be a rather shallow analysis of the market. I would like to be able to. We don't really have a good understanding as to what is really going on behind the scenes in places like Take 2 where they registered a loss even when they released one of the biggest games of the generation.

Of course they are morons

OK.  

Ah well, all the 3rd party games Wii might be lacking, 3DS is getting.

Nice OP Rol, however, I think you are pushing this conspiracy theory too hard. It really comes down to a smaller part of what you said in terms of long-term business decisions.

We all know the Wii was not considered to be anything but a failure before its launch. As such ALL 3rd parties put their money in PS360 and what that really means is they spent TENS of MILLIONS in developing software tools and APIs to create their games in efficient ways with the best possible results.

In 2007 when it was obvious Wii was an avalanche of success, the people who sit at the heads of the companies had a choice; spend another 'TENS of MILLIONS' to create a stand alone Wii engine that really took advantage of the system and could easily port games to PS360 (as happened to PS2) for future AAA games (which also reduces the expected return on the HD tools) or spend a far smaller amount of money (probably less than a million a year) on improving the tools they now have working from their first year games.

Throwing aside my fanboyish love for Nintendo, I too would have chosen the PS360 path.

It just makes sense, you know you'll make tons of money by keeping the HD path with the better concentration of core gamers. You know you can retool the PS2/GC engines from last gen for a far smaller amount of investment to capitalize on lower end Wii games over time. So why do it any other way? Where's the real financial gain? On top of that, those actually making the games have stressed an opinion to want to continue to push boundaries that you simply can't do on Wii. So its a win-win scenario to continue this HD path with a nominal investment on a Wii/PS2 path.

In hindsight we can see this clearly. No 3rd party AAA games, no 3rd parties pushing the limits of Wii's capabilities, no surge in core market as happened on DS, most games on Wii are also on PS2 as identicals (as long as they didn't require wiimote).

3DS demonstrates Nintendo's change though and the next home console will probably push that same envelope and come out with a far more comparable machine to whatever MS/Sony build. Nintendo has learned this lesson; they MUST remain within a technologically relative distance to their competitors or they will get ignored. 3DS shows this as its been mentioned to be far more capable than the PSP even with 3D effect in place.

1. I was thinking from the perspective of that time, when I said makes tons of money by sticking to HD path.

2. Gamecube was different in that by the time it launched it was already significantly losing to not only the PS2 by simply units sold but to the followup of the last gen winner (PS2 had tons of momentum). Nintendo shoudl never of let Sony get such a large headstart when PS1 had already had such a significant win the previous gen.

Third Parties' actions are deliberate..which makes them even more moronic.

Can you really prove that they would have lost any less money had they focused more heavily on the Wii and released twice the number of games? The issue really has always been too many developers and not enough software revenue. It doesn't matter how much each project costs to develop and I doubt it makes much difference if they release 3 Wii games for every one DX9 console game not made because its unlikely that overall industry software revenues would have increased much to compensate for increased development focus on the Wii.

At least by focusing on the DX9 consoles they developed software which will remain relevant for longer and invested in relevant technology which they would have needed to do anyway. Development on the Wii first and foremost would only really post-pone or defer the required investment to a later date.

Why should you attempt to prove this? Well you did make this thread...

Talent isn't always divisible. If you split one of the big successful developers into multiple component parts it doesn't mean that all the components will have equal chances of making successful games or that the games would likely add up to more in overall sales than a single game created by the whole company. Most of the successful game developers already prototype several different game concepts before they decide on the one concept to move forward with. It doesn't make much difference except that with three developers they would move forward on the top 3 game concepts rather than the single best one. The large supporting cast of developers around the core talent for the DX9 games on consoles are there to maximise the value of the core talent which are the people whom really are the true money makers.

Maybe its not the developers fault in regards to core games on the Wii. Perhaps the Wii simply isn't suitable for a wide range of game styles because gestures perhaps aren't adequate replacements for buttons. Maybe instead its the control scheme itself which needs to catch up to what the core game developers and the audience need for their games. The Wii is a unique platform with problems unique to it as a first place console when compared to other first place platforms. It follows logically that some of the unique issues related to the Wii are problems which exist with present Wii design, including the controller.

The publishers are supporting both but in general they have suffered major losses and have seemed to have pared back their development efforts for both the DX9 consoles and the Wii. It doesn't seem that from their behaviour or their balance sheets that they are having any more luck developing games on the Wii as compared to on the DX9 consoles in that development resources haven't shifted significantly in either direction since the start of the present generation. Theres nothing which has happened in the Wii market which has given any real encouragement for publishers. Possibly the reason for the lack of core support is that developers have tried and failed so spectacularly that the games haven't even been able to limp to the market so whilst they may have tried you would have seen no sign of it.

You start and then I'll follow your lead. One developer at a time. We can do this!