@ Esa-Petteri
Three things for your consideration:
1) I don't have any facts or figures in front of me, but it seems like whenever we've had reference to anything a developer has said, they've said that it's cheaper to develop for Wii than PS3/360 -- aren't they the ones that would know?
Does anyone have any quote, etc., from any developer that suggests that development costs are similar for Wii and the HD consoles?
2) I know that your point, in part, has been riffing off of the idea of an "average" game. That Wii games, "on average," cost less than HD games because the average takes into account the development costs of shovelware, and the Wii has a higher percentage of shovelware. I get what you're saying.
However, I think that you're mistaking the sense of the word "average" in that context. I think that, when someone says that Wii games are cheaper to develop on average than HD games, they're not referring to an actual statistical study of games developed (which would require access to information which, if it were available, we wouldn't be having this argument at all). Instead, they're referring to hypothetical games of equivalent quality. That is, shovelware vs. shovelware; average vs. average; AAA vs. AAA.
Now, a big difference between a AAA game on an HD system versus one on the Wii is: the HD game would have HD graphics, whereas the Wii game would not. And I think that this difference would require a greater investment of resources, especially programmer-hours, which would bloat the overall cost.
3) Another one of your arguments, I believe, comes down to an idea that... if we could take an HD game -- "as is" -- and "port" it to the Wii, it would cost much more money to develop, because of the intensive programming required to use the Wii architecture to its capacity (eventually hitting the limit of "impossible" regardless of expenditure). At the same time, if you took a Wii game, and did not increase its graphics to meet the HD standard, and put it on the 360, the cost to do so would be similar-to-less (less because the 360 is apparently more forgiving of bad code, though that idea baffles me).
Another simple way to look at this is: suppose we decided to put Pong, without any alteration, etc., on all three consoles; would it cost more to program Pong on PS3 than on Wii? I think probably not, and that's my concession of your point, as such.
However, no one's looking to release Pong. I think that the reason why there's discussion at all about these "average" costs, either here or by developers, is because companies are interested in producing games and selling them. This is an academic question for us, but for a small third party, it's an important and highly-practical one. The question is: where do I stand the best chance of making profit?
To answer that, a third party would have to try to determine which platform would involve the highest investment/overhead... and then weigh that against likely returns. Even if a third-party decided that something could be a million seller many times over on an HD system, they might not be able to take that substantial risk if the cost of entry were too high. And, to cap this argument, I think that the consensus is that the cost of entry on HD systems is substantially higher than on the Wii. Not because companies produce shovelware -- I also mean that the cost of entry for producing a crappy game on the PS3 would be higher than the cost of entry for producing a crappy game on the Wii. In fact, I believe that this is one of the prime reasons that the Wii has so much shovelware on it in the first place!
To compete in the HD marketplace -- which is the other half to the profit question -- a game probably has to be in high-def, etc., and the costs of developing such likely push the costs of HD games over-and-above the costs of Wii games. It isn't about quality, per se: if a company produced an 8-bit game, today, it could still be high-quality, and hell, it could still be AAA (imagine if the original LoZ were produced today, or Tetris... or, possibly we could just look at Mega Man 9). It could certainly be better than Lair. But it would be several orders cheaper than the cheapest HD game, because regardless of the quality of the final product, the required resources will always be mugh higher.
What do you think?
