There really is no data supporting the "Wii best sellers cost way less than PS360 best sellers" claim. There are some offhanded remarks about the "average Wii title" costing less than a PS360 game, and that's about it.

The average Wii title. Think about that for a sec. Average in sales? Average Number Sold? Mean dev cost? Median dev cost? Is marketing also cheaper on "average"? Why? Which publisher stated this? Was it one, or was it just a random developer claiming to know the entire industry? What's their definition of "average"? Etc.

A lot of leaps of faith, from a couple random quips.

Here are the games that deserve to sell that much

01. Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution (Tomy Corporation) 1.02m
06. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (LucasArts) 1.07m (heard it was shit, but meh)
07. Red Steel (Ubisoft) 1.08m
09. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (LucasArts) 1.12m
11. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (Capcom) 1.33m
13. Rock Band (MTV Games) 1.36m
14. MySims (Electronic Arts) 1.38m
16. Rayman Raving Rabbids (Ubisoft) 1.47m
17. Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 (Ubisoft) 1.58m
19. Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (Capcom) 1.75m
20. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (LucasArts) 1.99m
22. Guitar Hero: World Tour (Activision Blizzard) 2.18m

Here is another thing to think about. If Mario and sonic sold 6.69 million coppies at 49.99 each then thet made just shy of 335million dollars off that one game.

25. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (Sega) 6.69m (335 Million Dollars)

Crazy...

what an amazing list of games.

 I do wonder about that too, even if you had say, mean dev costs, a good deal of Wii developement seems to be a small group of devs working on what turns out to be an enhanced flash games or set of minigames. No doubt this does cost peanuts but it brings the average down. If someone wants to make a Mario Galaxy or Metroid Prime 3 it ain't gonna cost peanuts, albeit the equivalent on PS360 would cost me.

 Sometimes we get developers give an insight, I believe the mushroom men spore wars guys said they had a developement budget of $4 million. They're hardly going to be on the higher end of Wii developement though.

You can ignore the vast majority of publishers and developers who claim that it takes 2 to 4 times the development resources to make a HD game as it does to make a Wii game, and enjoy the magical world of gum-drops where the additional content needed to produce the advanced graphical effects that are in most HD games appears out of thin air ...

Third parties are roughly making less then $25 per game once you take out retail cut, royalties, production costs etc. Still that's a crazy amount of money.

What was your point though? That more third parties should put Mario on their game? :/.

It doesn't work that way.

Lots of 3rd party games do make money, but really, Nintendo fans will never admit that any games failed.

A game can sell like .05m copies, and they will say, "Well, we don't have updated Europe data, which was probably more then America, and the budget was really low, so they probably made some money." Seriously, you will find stuff like that on every poorly sold Wii game. They can not accept a failure.

People will admit that games failed, but most people's claims of games failing are pretty moronic ...

Consider that people were calling Zack and Wiki (500,000+ sales) and Boom Blox (700,000+ sales) failures when these games obviously cost less than the $10 to $20 Million in revenue they generated for their publishers.

Where are you pulling these numbers from.

The games failed, admit it. Btw HAZE is on its way to a million, still a failure.

Assuming a game that took more than a year to sell 500k is making 20 million is crazy. Plus, i bet you 80% of the sale happened when the game was dirt cheap. Less revenue, right.