Casual games cost marketing moolah, Ubisoft says

The gist of this is that Ubisoft's "Imagine" and "Petz" series are bestsellers, but that's because they spent quite a bit on marketing. Even though casual games don't cost a lot to develop, in order to reach that wider audience, you need wider marketing to reach that audience. I remember that Nintendo said that the Wii launch in North America had a $30 million marketing campaign.

Now I don't know if they spent enough to make it cost as much as the development of a big budget game, but it does show that casual doesn't always mean shovelware. Ubisoft is putting something of an investment in this market. 

Well this one was obvious, developers who make great games and think they will sell based off on quality only are stupid to say the least.

Nothing sells by itslef unless its a famous franchise, although hype is needed. I hope Wii developers start putting a bit more effort on their work after they finished making the game, so that people actually PLAY the game.

This actually does give developers less of an excuse. Sure Red Steel was a launch title, but it still had some marketing. 

I could be wrong but I suspect that they're spending more to market "Casual" games than they typically spend marketing a "Core" games; what I do think is happening is they're spending far more marketing "Casual" games than they would typically spend marketing games with similar development budgets.

For decades publishers have released (what they saw as) low budget niche titles with little or no marketing and were shocked so see that these games didn't tend to sell well; on occasion, due to a large designer being involved with these games a game would become successful and then the publisher would throw money behind it.

What Nintendo has demonstrated with the Wii and DS is there is an actual market for these "Niche" games but the gamers who are most interested in these games are the least likely to go searching for information about them.

It's the same thing that happens in every market.
Once the audience widens , marketing cost as a percentage of product cost increase and become very significant...