I'm confused... have you read that link?

"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."

They never said anything about quality or shovelware, only development costs. AAA games would cost half on Wii than on 360-PS3.

There is no reason for that budget for that game.  That's just Ubisoft blowing all their money on a shitty game.  But I think they were working on the game before they knew about the Wii's specs or the Wii remote, so that might have made it cost a little more.  They wanted to rush a big budget game to launch, and even though the game sucked, it totally worked and it sold 1 million instantly, making a nice profit.

Just imagine how good it could have been if each Ubisoft dollar spent on development was as good as a Nintendo dollar.  That would've been a hell of a game.

My bad, I mixed up your comments with a couple other guys.

I see that your budget discussion started with shovelware being an outlier, making Wii development seem even cheaper.

I could give that, but I remember some reports taking that into account.

Which is why big budget games for the systems are better to compare. Of course it's hard to give a full comparison, with game development costs not being an easily available kind of data.

I am confused. Ubisoft said that Red steel cost 13 million to make. Then someone from THQ said that they estimated that wii development costs range from one quarter to  half of hd-costs.

Then the writer of that article made assumption that red steel would cost 24-48 million to develop for ps3/360.

Still confused?

Edit:

Of course you missed the point why I posted that link, it was to show someone how much red steel did cost. :P

In conclusion, HD development is a lot more expensive than Wii development. So.... why so much arguing here?

In conclusion, that is what THQ said. If you take a look few posts back, you can find the links of what THQ has developed on all 3 platforms. From those links, you can see why developing for wii is "a lot" cheaper for THQ.

Yeah, I looked at them. But still, making those Wii games would had been more expensive on the HD platforms. The link you provided give an example with Red Steel.

Making an exactly same game(high quality) is actually cheaper for Ps3/360. You can get away with sloppy code on ps3/360 but not on Wii.

Oh and you are joking. Aren't you? Do you really consider that "estimation" a fact for what red steel would have cost on Ps3 or 360? Really?

Many have provided information about developers talking about costs, like the Mushroom Men guys. Maybe the estimation about Red Steel is a exaggerated, not 48 million, but almost the double I don't see why not. Of course visually it would not be the "exact" same game. Let's say it's the exact same game and looks like crap on HD, still because of the development tools it would had been more expensive to make.

Making the exact same game on all platforms would cost (essentially) the same ... The ammount of money you would save by not having to optimize your code would easily be lost in sales because the game does not live up to people's expectations for HD games.

The fact is that most publishers have estimated the development cost of a HD game at (somewhere) between 2 and 4 times the cost of producing a similar Wii game ... There is a lot that is open to interpretation, but the conclusion that has to be made is that Wii games are noticeably less expensive than HD games to develop.