The Wii 3rd party scene is noticeably improving with new games being announced on a more and more frequent basis but so far they seem to be reasonably conservative projects. Titles like No More Heroes and Final Fantasy:CC plus a few others stand out from a largely unremarkable crowd but they still fall short in terms of scale and budget when compared to 360's & PS3's 3rd party big-hitters.

My question is when will a truly ambitious project be announced and which company will be the first to take the plunge?

Surely it can't be long! Even taking the biggest of the 3rd party games, MGS4 & FFXIII, it would take considerably less money to bring these projects to Wii due to it's modest hardware and SD(ED if you want to get picky) output. Combine this with the well publicised record growth of the Wii userbase and you'd think there'd be a crowd of devs rolling the dice and risking some serious dough. I think this will inevitably be the case in the future but it's hard to pin-point exactly when the flood gates will open.

I'm going to take a punt on Capcom being the first due to the predicted success of both RE games and continued through-the-roof sales of the system which will silence the lingering critics who still cry 'gimmick' & 'fad' but don't think it'll be announced til Q1 '08'.

What do you guys think? Place your bets!! 

I bet Ubisoft with Rayman Raving Rabbids and Red Steel at launch.

So what do I win?

Ubisoft for sure.

MGS FF13 will never come to the wii, those games are very dependent on powerfull hardware. Spin offs sure but not the actual MGS4 or FF13

Square enix is a good choice... perhaps with KH 3

They'll have had decent budgets for sure but nothing approaching that of Mario Galaxy or big 360/PS3 games. Red Steel 2 may be different but we won't know til we here more about it.

 Red Steel was a 10 million dollar game. It was mediocre, but it was still a 10 million dollar game. That's probably as high as any Wii game will go, I suspect.

Well MGS1-3 and FF1-12 were all on systems weaker than Wii. I wasn't  predicting they'd come to Wii though but rather that projects similiar in scale and ambition could be done on Wii for cheaper and looking at Wii hardware sales, bring in more profit.

May I ask why you think 10 million will be the ceiling budget?

If Ubisoft were willing to sink 10 mill into a Wii game at a time when the system was an unknown entity wouldn't it be realistic to think they or some other 3rd party would be willing to up the ante now that Wii has established itself as a runaway success? 

Anyone knows why it costed 10 million?

Because of the engine? advertising?

Red Steel was heavily advertised. Also, it was running on a modified version of the Unreal 2 Engine. I'm guessing half of the cost was for the game, the other have for the advertising campaign that turned a mediocre game into a million seller worldwide. Not only that, but code was changed again and again after some hands on impressions with the swordplay.