http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/898/898610p1.html

I realize this is only about North American developers, but it's still really interesting.

that was eeerrrhhhh, interesting to say the least

Not really. You could look at a release date calendar to get that info.

Hows this microsoft discussion...

It was on Xbox360.ign.com

its on the whole site... each sub-domain has it... well should...

I remember seeing that quite a while ago. Not sure why IGN suddenly picked it up.

Self-selecting sample = fail.

This is useful market research for Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine concerning their readership, but not useful for much else.

Unfortunately like much of life it's not about love but money. I don't doubt that many if not most developers LOVE to make games that showboat graphic horsepower. Unfortunately with reportedly only 30% of games recovering development costs and those costs are (depending on who you ask) somewhere between 2 to 5 times more on the HD platforms than the Wii (One major developer stated that it cost$9M extra just to achieve the higher graphics).... well, you can do the math. And a lot more companies are starting to.

Publishers of several Wii games have reported making a very decent profit on sales of 200,000 - 300,000 games. And I'm not just talking about crap, some very good games like Boom Blox. If your development costs start at $6-12M, (PS3 average is $15M) anything less than 500,000 is a complete disaster. Unless Haze cost one hell of a lot less than I think it did, someone took a hell of a beating.

GTA4 was a huge hit, but with development costs of $100M, the return is less than you might think. Even on that huge sales volume, the development cost per game sold is no less than FF XII back on the PS2. No one can afford a flop anymore on any HD console. Exclusives make the risk even higher and will become rarer. Sadly It will become more and more like Broadway. No one can afford to take a chance on something new so we will see the same old games with a higher number and that's not good news for anybody. Are we looking forward to a future of Grand Theft Auto 112, and will Final Fantasy be like McDonalds years ago when they quit keeping count at all.

It may not be a very fair comparison but you have to wonder what Wii Sport cost to develop for 27M units sold. That has to be a great deal. The average cost to develop for the DS is about $1M. Anyone want to even guess how much Nintendogs has made?

It may prove that seeing games in prettier and prettier graphics may mean seeing a lot less games in total, and no totally new and untried games at all. Even though I don't personally own either an Xbox 360 or a PS3 currently, I sincerely hope that this will not be the case. But unless something can be done to control runaway development costs, I can't see it not happening whether anyone wants it to or not.