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.

Hey Bod, you're calculating retail cost, not wholesale.

Right? As I said, 4-5 of the extra 10 retail dollars go to the producers. Can you explain what's wrong with that? 

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 GHIII, 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.  

I love the way that some people pick a month and judges the entire market over it. Or like some appears to want that Nintendo releases trash games only to let some market to the 3rds or crap like that.

These just ignores the facts that the Nintendo Games selling well (Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Wii Fit, Wii Play) have:
- AAA Quality/Effort/Budget (ok, maybe Wii Play get out of the hook in this one)
- Marketing
- Strong brands
- Market Appeal

The combination of these characteristics are lacking on 3rd parties in general, so it surely will not sell like hot cakes compared to the ones that have.

This kind of thread just make me sick.

I don't even understand what you are arguing for or against to be quite honest.

Oh no I'm not buying it only for SO4.  But with the threat of Eternal Sonata never crossing the Pacific on PS3 I think it's become necessary to have one, even if I'm never going to play anything but RPGs on it.  Hell, they are like $200 for an Arcade on eBay.   Might as well buy one at this point.

Because retailers don't buy the game at $60.00, they pay approximately $48.00 from the distributor (Jack of all Games, D&H Distributing, Ingram Entertainment, Mecca electronics, etc...) who pay even less from the publisher.  ~$40.00 depending on their annual unit contract.

Now you want to redo your math?

That's exactly what I did, we're just looking at this from different angles. 

Of the 60 total dollars, retailers get a share, developers get a share, publishers get a share, console manufacturer gets a share.

Both the Wii and Ps3/360 suffer from this problem, the difference is that with Ps3/360 games, retailers get an additional 2-3 dollars, the console manufacturer gets an additional 2-3 dollars, which leaves an additional 4-5 dollars for the publisher/developer, totaling 10 extra dollars.

Let me put it more generally: there are 10 dollars more to go around with each game sold on the PS3/360. Some of that 10 dollars go to retail, some to the console manufacturer, and whatever is "extra money" for the developer/publisher. That extra money adds up when you're talking about large amounts of sales.