Riccitiello addresses this in the source interview, immediately before the start of the quote in the OP:
"The – on the Wii, I would say it is structurally different in a number of ways relative to the PS3 and Xbox 360. One is the prevailing premium price. It is $10 a unit less than it is for Xbox 360 and PS3 games."

Wii - $49.99
HD consoles - $59.99

The developer/publisher does not get all $10.00 of those extra dollars strictly for development either.   Some goes to retail, some to marketing, some to distribution.

@Viper1: We never knew exactly how much cheaper Wii development was

@ramuji: I took into account the fact that some things would cost the same plus Wii games are generally $49.99 instead of $59.99 and then used some very liberal rounding to get a ballpark kind of figure.

I'm willing to bet CoD: WaW has sold at least 800k and that Activision had next to no advertising for it and it shipped far less copies (obvious things really) so It'd be around the same profit region as the PS3 version

Yeah, I figured as much after I posted. Didn't mean to sound like I was nitpicking you on that point.

There were quite a few publishers back in 2005/2006 who were claiming XBox 360/PS3 games were costing 3 to 4 times as much as previous generation console games ... "Half" has just been an estimate that people use because it causes fewer arguments.

@ Ramuji & Viper1 thanks

@ramuji No worries man :)

I think the over all point here is that third parties will begin to support the Wii much more beginning this year due the marketshare combined with dev costs combined with healthy sales and profits

and this is the reason why they still make core games for Wii even if most of them do not sell a million

also, imagine what kind of profit EA makes from MySims on Wii, Activision with Guitar Hero, Sega with Sonic and Capcom with RE, so this is why so many hard core games are coming for Wii in 2009

the better way to look at it without putting the $ sign in the formula is calculate units required to make profit. According to bandai HD games require a minimun of 500k to break even and if we use this number to put in the 1/3 and 1/4 ratio, then the wii games only require to sell 170k and 125k to break even.

No Wonder Sega is laughing their way to the bank with Mario & Sonic.

Isn't this the same EA that said that they will be releasing 50% of their titles on the Wii?  They are still only spending 1/5 of their resources on a console with 1/2 the marketshare.  Shouldn't they be releasing 4/5 of their games on the Wii to give it the respect it deserves by devoting resources equalt to PS3+360 to it?