It seems there is a strong correlation between development cost and installed base and games sell (not surprising) and that has to be good news for Wii and DS owners. The unfortunate exception is the PSP which by every parameter has seriously underperformed. The Wii is doing well having the largest library, a 10M seller (non-bundled) and the greatest total sales by top ten games for a non-handheld, and surprisingly close to even the DS.

(Data from VG Chartz) * Excludes Wii Sport  ** Nintendogs should >20M by Xmas

The data for PSP titles on VGChartz is lacking in some areas and shouldn't really be used in this type of analysis.

Sorry, I wasn't aware of that, if you have better data I will happily make corrections.

Just curious, where did you get you dev costs? Other than that, really pretty interesting analysis.

No worries. I'm sure each console has a few holes in it's sales data...the PSP just seems to have the largest holes, especially for data in Others. But you probably wont find better data anywhere else.

I'm curious about this too. And do the >1M figures include the titles listed under >10M?

yea there is a lot of data missing from PSP and DS mainly. 360's first year numbers probably have a lot of data missing also.

Where is the dev cost info from?

Sorry, I was gone all day and didn’t have a chance to respond. Actual game development (and development + publishing costs) are hidden like nuclear launch codes. I used a combination of comments and interviews and a few key articles most of which I didn’t bookmark except for this especially useful one http://www.diggingtheweb.com/wiki/DevelopmentCost .

A developer being interviewed said that DS games usually cost a few million so I interpreted that as 1-3 million. Another article said the PSP cost about the same as the PS2 to develop for and Fumitsu once estimated PS2 games as costing 3-8 million.

The Wii has been quoted to cost 1/3 or even ¼ as much as HD, and not much than the PSP which made it fairly easy to come up with a low end. The high end is pretty much a plain guess because I’m sure the most expensive game was made by Nintendo and they are extraordinary close mouthed.

Ubisoft's Red Steel game for Wii will incur a development cost of approximately $12.75 million, according to a report by JeuxFrance.com. Red Steel is being readied to launch alongside the Wii later this year. According to its developers, the game will have approximately 13 hours of play time.

Wii is considered to be the cheapest next-generation console to develop for. In May, THQ president Brian Farrell estimated Wii development costs are in the range of a quarter to half of that required for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 development. What does this mean for developers? A game such as Red Steel could cost them between $24 - $48 million on PS3 or 360.

The HD consoles, I would have started higher but I allowed for the fact that part of the development is sometimes partially split between them but at least two developers have claimed that just doing the HD graphics adds about 9M.  The high end was easier, because it is claimed that GTA IV cost about 100M and that the PS3 costs more than Xbox so I split it 60/40. Also the cost of Halo 3 and MGS 4 seem to basically support these numbers also.

I claim no scientific precision for these estimates but they are consistent  with what little information I have.

Grampy, you forgot about the 159 XBL titles.