As a Nintendo gamer I of course focus alot of my attention to Nintendo's product line-up. Recently I'm noticing more and more that companies are unloading cheaper and cheaper games 24/7 taking advantage of consumers low expectations. Is this in any way acceptable!

After last E3 EACanada stated in the Province newspaper that their PS3 titles would cost them upwards of 30-million Canadian. That budget is amazing , but at the same time BandaiNamco stated a big budget Wii game would go for about 4-million USD which is significantly cheaper then games for any other platform.

The Wii is perfect for the indy developers to make solid games on. It gives indy developers a chance at competing in the global market place but what have we seen? We see companies like EA , THQ , Midway and many others giving us cheaply developed games sold at big budget prices. This is going to be devastating to the indy studios and publishers like CodeMasters who find it hard enough to stay in the race without wave after wave of titles that look indy!

Now EAGames announces they have over 14-games comming to the Wii this year. Not a single one of the titles announced looks any better then a GameCube game. Why don't they? because EA has a few Nintendo exclsuive studio's handling multiple projects at a time while its main studios continue to develope new content for the likes of PS3/360.

So why the low budget's, developers and publishers who are spending 30-mill on a PS3 game are only spending about 4-5 mill on a Wii game. The Wii games are actually selling while their PS3 games are sitting on shelves gathering dust. Why is it we haven't seen any bigger budget gtames for the Wii?  The Wii hardware can handle Doom3/RE4 infact it can handle 3x the power of the X-Box which could play games like Half-Life2 , Halo2 and Doom3. But on the Wii we see games that look like their built from the ground up for PlayStation not even meeting the GameCube's graphical standards.

So what's it going to take to get publishers to stop being cheap skates and actually give us a ten million dollar Wii game. I have no doubt that with the right budget a Wii game could come extremely close to looking just as good as say Gears on a normal TV. I mean look at Doom3/Half-Life2 and imagine 3x the graphics of those games. 3x the graphics of Half-Life2 would look suprisingly good people get the idea the Wii isn't capable of much just look at what the GameCube was capable of (ResidentEvil4).

So are publisher's being cheap skates , are they just taking advantage of Consumer Nievity or are they just legitametly over worked unable to do any better on the Wii?

Right now devs don't know what to do with the Wii. I think Nintendo did a piss-poor job of helping them prepare for the entirely different nature of the Wii. Expect to see crappy ports and poorly executed games until at least the holiday season with the bulk of the good games coming out sometime next year. It's unfortunate (especially since I have a Wii collecting dust), but I think that's what is going to happen. No one was prepared for the machine and no good game will take less than 18 months to hit shelves. Which is why I was so disappointed to see Sadness hit the chopping block. It looked like the one good third party game that I wanted this year. The good thing is that it's a huge hit in Japan. The Japanese and their love for quirky yet completely addictive games are the perfect storm for the Wii and Wiimote. Remember that even Nintendo's one "killer app" isn't even a damned Wii game. It's a port. It's a good-looking port but six months after launch, I find it very depressing that no one has topped a first party port from last generation.

No question it's going to take some time -- big-budget efforts are generally long-schedule efforts.  You can't throw additional programmers and artists at a project and cut its development cycle down significantly, without risking quality.  The Wii also didn't initially appear to merit that scale of investment -- now that it's launched and the sales numbers are indicating that it is worthy of support, it will still take time for third-party publishers to catch up.  Everyone wants to release something NOW and cash in, of course, which is why we get Rapala Fishing Tournament and Wing Island at the moment.

That said, all else being equal, the SAME degree of epic development SHOULD always cost less on the Wii.  The system just doesn't have the memory or hardware to support high-resolution textures and full-blown surround sound design.  That means the games don't require the same level of artistic investment, which translates directly into labor savings.

I'm not talking about artistic investment in terms of creativity or aesthetic judgment.  I don't mean that games have to look bad on the Wii.  They could and should look better than most of what's coming out now.  But it takes real time and effort to make the details look good for HD, which means somebody's getting a paycheck to put in that effort.  If it takes an artist a day to model and texture a medium-resolution object for the Wii instead of three days to finalize the same object for the HD systems, the difference appropriately results in lower expenditures on the Wii.

I'd much rather see the development budget go into the story and scope of a game than its looks -- and it's arguably cheaper to max out the looks on the Wii than on other systems.  I don't have a problem with that.  Wii games will soon look better than they do now, guaranteed -- but creating a 1028x1040 resolution wall texture would just be a waste.

I think we can all agree that this years games aren't that great, and it won't be until the holidays and beyond when we start seeing quality games, considering that developers didn't really jump on board until after the Wii became a launch success.

I thought that Treasure Island Z and RE:UC would appear early after the summer??

I actuly disagre with that point, it is simple so that no one belived that the Wii would be such a huge hit. It wasn't nintendo that didn't prepare well it was simple so that no one thought PS3 would sell so bad and that Wii would kick so much ass.

It is somewhat hard for devs to turn on a dime.  They can't just stop working on a $20 million project that they've already sunk $15 million in just because they suddenly realized they put it on the system with the lowest install base by far.  The next group of games will see much bigger budgets for the Wii since devs won't make the same mistake twice.

As far as the Wii is concerned, it is undoutedly easy to develop for in general but not at first.  It is essentially the same architecture as the GameCube (which was also easy) but how many third party devs took the time to fully utilize the GCN's hardware?  Not many, RE4 is one of only a few games that used even half the GCN's power.  One of the primary problems being that the TEV on the flipper, which could produce the same type of effects the Xbox's shaders did,was little understood and somewhat complicated.  Presumably the Wii shares similar issues with its GPU.  Even something easy will take time to learn. 

3rd party devs are probably also spending more time on the controls than usual (even though it is hard to tell they spent any time when playing some of their games).  One of the reasons being that until a few months ago devs had to figure out the calculus functiones required for each move they wanted to capture.  It was taking a lot of time and money to do that.  Now they not only have more experience with what works and what doesn't but there is also a computer program that automatically generates the function based on how the programmer moves a Wiimote.  Why Nintendo didn't have such a program over a year ago for 3rd parties is beyond me.

It is somewhat forgivable that the 3rd party devs aren't ready.  First year games from them are usually bad.  The Wii is certainly worse than most consoles since the companies stupidly missed the boat and the new controls took more time than expected.  These companies have and are paying the price for it, their earnings have been disappointing while their crapware isn't selling and it's all they have.  With time and experience their games should markedly improve on the Wii.  I'm sure they don't want to to face their shareholders with poor earnings again next year so they really don't have a choice in the matter.

They're trying to make a quick buck because the Wii is popular. Also, RE:UC is out in June and Treasure Island Z is coming out soon too, but I don't think that second title is much of a budget (it looks good though) and RE:UC if done well is perfect for the Wii, but I have low hopes after the previous 1st person RE game...

@Joelcool7

I don't think the numbers are as clearcut as you see them.  For example you quote $30 million for EA Canada and $4 million for Bandai Namco without mentioning advertising budgets, licensing fees (console manufacturers and intellectual property owners), cost of goods, etc.  Not only that but the $4 million quoted for Bandai Namco is outrageously low considering that advertising costs alone for the average next generation game is well over $4 million dollars alone.

Here's a chart from an article that talks about the costs of games on next generation consoles compared to previous ones:

                                                             Average Game Budgets

                       Source: http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/advertorial/?id=12089

Ok I'm going to make two assumptions before I begin and that is that the cost of game development for the Wii is the same as on the PS2-Xbox-GCN (I feel that's being extremely favorable to the Wii considering I suspect it's actually a little higher) and I'm going to assume everything else (advertising budget, cost of goods, etc) would be the same for the company regardless of what console they're making the game for. 

So we have a game that cost $25,000,000 total on a Xbox 360 and $18,000,000 on the Wii (Since I'm assuming the Wii's average development costs are the same as the PS2-Xbox-GCN generation).  Now using that chart they would have to sell 1,086,957 on the Xbox 360 to break even and 782,608 on the Wii to break even (using the blended Worldwide Wholesale Price point).  Now on the surface it appears that the average Wii game has an advantage but you'll see how that actually disappears.  If you take a look at the average price that an Xbox 360 game sells for you'll see that it's on average $10 more than it's Wii counterpart so adding that into the equation it would require 757,576 sales Worldwide to break even.  Not only is that smaller than the Wii's but it also means that every game sold after it passes it's break even mark actually makes $10 more than every Wii game sold after it's passes it's break even point which adds to the advantage.

Of course things aren't always clearcut and some games that would sell well on the Xbox 360 may not sell as well as on the Wii and vice-versa.  Also the company has to look at the competition on a given console and of the three Nintendo has the strongest first party based on total sales of their games.  The installed base is also a major factor in the decision making process.

Also all of this doesn't take into account Microsoft and Sony's downloadable content for games which adds more money into developer's pockets sometimes (take a look at Need For Speed Carbon, you could pay for additional cars for it on Xbox Live, what they didn't tell you is that the cars are *already* on the dvd and don't actually have to be downloaded, basically a person is paying for something that is already there).  What's to stop developers from planning downloadable content from the get-go and then basically just taking a part of the finished game and charging for it (sleezy I know but as pointed out EA has done that at least once).

Anyways hopefully I got my point across about why game budgets for different consoles and profits based on the number of games sold isn't as clear cut as it would seem on the surface.

 (oops sorry Joelcool7 I completely misread your post, I'm not sure why they're being cheapskates I suspect the reason why games don't take advantage of the system as much as they should it because a lot of developers were caught with their pants down, they assumed the PS3 was going to quickly take number one and it would be business as usual, so they had to rush to get their games out on the Wii).

Where did you get the info that there were no such libraries included the dev kits? And exactly what "computer program" are you talking about?

Plus, this is a just a wild guess, but I'd say most moves aren't going to be coded through "calculus functions", but with machine learning and pattern recognition.

IGN, Kotaku, Joystiq, Codename Revolution, etc all had stories in October, a few months earlier than I thought. However, I'll gather the video game news so you don't have to.  This is the IGN story http://wii.ign.com/articles/739/739007p1.html 

The main points I made for anyone who doesn't want to read the article:

"As a final few notes about the Wii-mote data, developers have talked with us on multiple occasions about a few annoying aspects of the current Wii-mote gesture recognition. Since the Wii-mote works off acceleration, programmers have to be well-versed in calculus to program speed and point recognition into an actual in-game move."

and

"LiveMove is essentially a program that does all the dirty work that Wii programmers have been doing freehand in the initial launch run of games. Using complex formulas, programmers have been creating starting points, ending points, speed, distance, and acceleration (speed change over time) all on their own with only the Wii-mote data to help. With LiveMove, developers can simply set up the software to record motions on the fly. Simply boot up the program, label your move, grab the Wii-mote and go. "

It should be obvious that using accelerometers to get any velocity or location info would require calculus since you need to integrate once or twice to get it.  Also since it's in 3 dimensions it would be at least multivariable calculus which is a second year calculus class and probably a lot higher.

Even so it appears devs should have these kits a while ago so that only excuses the bad games for the first 6 months of this year.  By July any game should have been developed with LiveMove so there's no wiimote related excuses.