In a sense you're correct. Higher-budget games are often the AAA games that Nintendo is accusing third-parties of not bringing to the Wii. The fact that developers' A-teams are naturally assigned to the high-budget projects exacerbates this dilemma.

The last sentence in your post, however, is wide of the mark. The fact that Wii games can be made with smaller budgets is a massive boon for the Wii. It permits developers to make quirkier games, without having to worry as much about getting bankrupted as a result. A game like Boom Blox or Little King's Story, for instance, is less likely to have been made for the HD consoles, because of those consoles' high price of entry.

We also know that several developers have literally been priced out of HD development because of the prohibitive price tag. Hudson has been completely open about the fact that it can not and will not pay for the price of HD development. Marvelous and Majesco have hinted similarly, and acted accordingly. In fact, as far as I can tell the bulk of the small and mid-sized studios who are making console games are now focusing primarily on the Wii, likely for just that reason. So in that sense, it is indeed a massive boon to the Wii, and to gamers in general.

hm, i think she's true

only a few Ps2 ports use motion controls in a nice way

Sonic Secret Rings for example uses motion controls in great way, and makes Sonic more enjoyable on Wii

you can't say there are no core gamers on Wii, watching Zelda, Metroid, RedSteel and RE selling that well
it think a little more advertisement and gameplay emphasis would bring a good result, i mean, Game Party and Rayman Rabbits have good gameplay and they sell good, same with Dragonball Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and MySims

@Groucho

But lets compare apples to apples.

A game with high production values on the Wii, like Mario Galaxy, is still much cheaper than a game with high production values on the HD consoles.

A game with low production values on the Wii, is still much cheaper than a game with low production values on the HD consoles.

You make it sound pretty great, in Wii-developer land.  Like there is free lunch and everything.  I hate to tell you that this just isn't the case.  Money brings quality.  As a matter of fact, the Wii is in the terrible position of having to "compete" with consoles that far outpower it, unlike any console from a previous generation, where the power differences were much lesser.

Squeezing performance out of a console costs darn near as much as throwing the kitchen sink in does.  There are no "cheap" quality titles on the Wii, excepting those innovative titles that also appear (in other forms) on the HD consoles.  Braid, for example.  No More Heroes, for example.  Pixeljunk Eden, for example.  Super Stardust HD?  Geometry Wars?  Lost Winds?  Those are great, great games.  They were dirt cheap to make.

Are they high production value?  No.  Do they stand toe-to-toe with the high production value HD titles?  No.  Are they fun?  You bet.

If you are saying that the Wii can have great games, for cheap, just like PSN and XBLA, you are absolutely correct.  The Wii is no easier, and by that I mean cheaper, to make high production value games for, than the other consoles.  The fact that the "Average wii game costs less to make" is a statement about the average Wii game... not the cost of development per unit quality on the Wii.

I can't agree or disagree.  I do know that Super Mario 64 cost Nintendo $30 million (!).  I don't know what SMG cost, so I don't think I can comment on that... but I doubt it was "cheap".

Much cheaper than it would have been to develop on the 360 or PS3.

@Groucho: The visuals on HD consoles take a lot of time and money to make. Basically you could say that the more horsepower your game is using, the more expensive your game is. Now that you mentioned XBLA and PSN, we really should compare them to WiiWare, which is Nintendos equivalent. And is cheaper to develope...

What's your reasoning behind this belief?  I have seen a number of reports that state the "average Wii game" is cheaper than the "average X360/PS3 game", but that's very misleading -- I hope you understand the dichotomy of the two interpretations of that kind of statement.  

In what magical way is the Wii "easier" to develop quality titles for?  

Is it easier to program 1 Broadway processor, rather than 1 processor of the Xenon or the PS3's PPU?  No -- they all have fine C++ compilers and development environments, and all three development kits have decent APIs and libraries.  Is it "easier" to write to the all the way down to the hardware on the Broadway, to squeeze every ounce of available power out of it, than it is to write parallel engine code that runs on 3 Xenon PowerPC cores, or 2 HW PPU threads and 6 SPUs?  No, actually.  

Is it "easier" to have a new artist slap together models that look decent in 3DS Max/Maya/etc. with a lot of polys, and good textures, or is it easier to hire some spendy technical art pros, who understand how triangle stripping works, and efficient model building, to do it with just a few polys and lesser textures?  

Is it easier to design a high-production-value game that has a huge number of limitations, because the hardware it runs on has only 64MB of memory, or easier to write a high-production-value game that can use 256MB, do you suppose?

Wii games cost less, because they are less.  Wii games that cost more (and I would not doubt for a second that games like SMG, MP3, Zelda, etc. cost in the tens of millions to make, given that SM64 cost $30M) are more.  If 3rd parties spent more on the Wii, we'd have more SMGs and MP3s and Zeldas.  There's no magic here.

One of the biggest gripes reviewers have with Wii games is that they "look like PS2 games".  Well, guess what, back when budgets were PS2-sized, ALL games looked like PS2 games.  You get what you pay for.

@Groucho: Let's start from character models, according to Kazunori Yamauchi, cars in GT5 are made from 200 000 polygons on average, as opposed to 4 000 in GT4. And how was it, it took a week from one guy to program a car to GT4 and a month to GT5.
And the same goes for evinronments; the better looking evinronment, the more it cost to make.

And more programmable features you have, the more expensive it is to use them.

Look, the developement costs have already gone up from last gen. Compare what the games cost to make in 2000-2003 and what they cost in 2005-2008.

What you were suggesting earlier, was programming a constrained system. If we go by system power in relation to available memory, 360 and PS3 seem to be more constrained than Wii in that aspect, assuming they are at least ten times as powerful as Wii.
As for Super Mario 64, it was delayed a few times due Miyamoto thinking the wasn't good enough, so it raised the costs and N64 happened to be a tricky system to program due to its bottlenecks. Wii has a better design and it should be easy to program for (at least that was the hardware focus with GC design) and someone mentioned somewhere that SMG would have cost 14 million to make (of course, i don't know whether it's true or not, just like the 30 million on SM64).

Anyway, another thing what you said was, that the game developement on HD consoles is as cheap as it on Wii, if the games have Wiis visual quality. That's not the case with most of the HD games, atleast the ones that are supposed to sell on PS360 and the manufacturers requirements are somewhat above Wiis capabilities, so there goes that argument.