The other thing that they're going to have to do is rein in the ridiculous amounts of money they're spending on games, much of it producing no significant improvement at all. Control your costs, and you can build an equally good game for far less money.

Huh.

That 3 out of 10 figure looks strikingly like a good game to shovelware ratio.

im not sure that this is true

Good observation. Basically summed up my comment before I made it.

Underperforming per the current game budgets, maybe.  Or is it just that the current game budgets are too high?

Well Wisdom, some cheap budget shovelware games make money even if they don't sell A Millie, unfortunately.

 You know, as soon as i read the title, I knew someone was going to spin it into how nintendo and fellow wii devs have made so much money that they gave them some for free lol.

That's not that surprising ...

I remember seeing an interview a couple of years back where someone claimed that only the top 125 games for the PS2/Gamecube/XBox were profitable in a given year; I assumed at the time that most shovelware was not included which would put it at (roughly) 50% of games turned a profit.

It's their own fault that they make expensive HD games.....

... hmm or is it sony and MS that they sould blame??

This was the case long before the Wii even existed. I would wager that the Wii actually makes the problem worse -- you can't risk large dev costs on the Wii with so much shovelware competition and an untargetable (i.e. general) audience, but at the same time, it takes a reasonably large cost to create a decent game in the first place. If 3rd parties actually do up the Wii budgets from the 25-50% of the HD budgets that they are now, their risk will go up even moreso.

25%-50% budget for Wii titles doesn't mean they are the same quality of title as a typical HD title. A shovelware game on the Wii costs 25% what a AAA game on a HD console might take, but the potential profit margins are not necessarily better (yet).

Publishers have been playing this ugly gambling game since the mid-90s. 30% is actually an improvement over what it was then. Its the blockbusters that make money and save publishing companies -- hence the increasing budgets of games over the years, and the willingness to risk more, while upping the bar and bringing the games industry to its current state -- anything under about $8-10 million USD is a "budget" title. Most AAA games cost $15-20 million.  Wii games tend to cost $2-$5 million, but we're talking shovelware.  THe AAA Wii games cost nearly as much as the HD AAA titles do.

This same trend is the major reason a number of genres on the PC have died over the past decade, and now only exist in semi-professional forms from "low cost" development studios (often in Eastern Europe) -- namely flight sims, space combat sims, and many forms of WRPGs. The revenue was never great enough to justify the expense of making these titles in modern-day form.