Interesting.

I love how Jammy just ignores my first point of the game not faring much better, or better at all on any other platform.

There is also no denying that Wii dev costs are way cheaper than HD costs..this is fact. Imagine if the game bombed on an HD platform...what would happen to that company?

Well that just sucks, Zack and Wiki was a great game. :(

I always wondered what kind of factor people have in mind when they say "Wii developement is way cheaper".

Is it 2x as expensive to make a compareable HD game ? 3x? 10x? What does "way cheaper" mean? And how can it be "fact", if it's little more than a blanket statement thrown into the conversation ?

In my humble opinion there are several Wii game projects that top a lot of full price HD game projects in developement costs.

*looks at free radical and factor 5*

Yeah...

Anyway, if he's right that they spent $2 million to advertize the game in Japan, then that's their **** up.  There is no way in hell I'd have green lighted the project if someone came to me and told me Z&W was on a budget that expected 400k sales in Japan alone for a new IP.  That's just failure waiting to happen.  Unless, of course, they never intended to advertise anywhere else, and then they simply blew their whole load on the wrong region.  Again, Capcom's fault.  By all rights Z&W should have made money, and if it didn't that is totally on Capcom's poor marketing decisions.

Also, Sven is clearly being coy with a lot of responses.  When he said that about Okami sales, I think he knew full well that the game had sold ~300k WW on Wii and ~300k in US on PS2, and there is no expectation of further sales.  So the port did fine 'cause a port is dirt cheap but the PS2 version sank them.  They were undoubtedly expecting WW sales of 2-3 million.

Double post...

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15806

Apparently, Wii games are cheaper enough.

@ NJ5 )

yes, I never denied that it's cheaper, I'm arguing about the "way cheaper" here, for some seem to believe any kind of game magically is profitable thanks to Wii developement being "way cheaper"

btw I personally believe the factor is at 1.6-2.2x depending on if the game needs it's own engine and is developed by a studio with prior HD/Wii experiences

Thanks NJ5, I was actually looking for that other chart with Factor 5 Dev costs as well.

Chichiri, I have not heard of a company going belly up after a game bombs on the Wii..have you? Capcom's still trucking along.

 I never saw the point in bringing other platforms into discussion, we're talking about the success of a game on the Wii. I never mentioned the PS360 and didn't see a need too, it was completely irellevent to point out for what I was saying.

 It would have flopped harder on the PS360 but er, so what? Capcom should keep making games on the Wii cause they make smaller losses?

 My feeling about this game (As brief as possible) is this game was supposed to do on the Wii what Ace Attourney did for them on the DS. Accessible point and click type puzzle game, strong Japan marketing. It flopped in Japan pretty hard (The 30k is a media create figure, the one reliable number), so they decided to give up on it in the West marketing-wise. Which I'd say was a good decision, considering the European sales were supposedly very poor too, and Nintendo did market this game, with TV adverts just one method of said promotion (I saw a few fo sho).

The thing for me is this is just a good reminder of how hard it is for anyone on here to deem any game a success or failure on any system. Wii fans were slating people to piece when they suggested this game sold bad, or lost money, or wasn't successful a few days ago, and now it turns out those people were, to some extent, correct.