Why the hell not? Games like Final Fantasy XII costed over 40 million. Any game with high productino values cost a lot of money, regardless of console.

Period.

MH3 maybe 20 mill. But the Conduit? Are you kidding? They didn't even have a punblisher until recently and I hardly believe that HVS has 20 mill laying around. 10-12 tops, though Sega will certainly spend a good amount on ads. But ads do not equal production cost.

Didn't epic outsource much of Gears' dev? Also the fact that its their engine that was being used help to lower those costs. I mean Why do people continue to argue with the facts. Wii dev is cheaper than HD dev; we've had industry developers and publishers say this on a multitude of occasions 1/3-1/4 the costs. Let it go.

$16 million was the number I heard for SMG, but the bulk of work put into SMG was all creative. The cost comes from the graphics, and that's what the two I mentioned are pushing for.

@ Arius

Actually, we've had one company give out that figure. And consider the size of the teams and the games released from the company, I'm surprised it's not more.

$20 million is very unlikely for Conduit. It's dev cycle is only 18 months and a few months ago a developer stated they had about 30 people working on it at the time. I have no doubt that the team was larger at certain points in the dev cycle, but I don't see how it could have cost $20 million.

$20 million probably would come close to paying for the salaries of all 130 High Voltage employees for that 18 month period, but they've had other projects in the works during that period, including lots of WiiWare and licensed work.

Your $10 million estimate seems far more plausible.

If ads aren't production cost, where do they go to?

No, it is indeed hard to use actual numbers in an industry that seems to live in its own little financial Wonderland. [March 11, 2009] Rockstar proudly announces selling 13 million copies of GTA IV and by the way, we lost $50 million doing it. Their stock tumbles. [March 13, 2009] Rockstar stock rebounds on the strength of early sales of the DS version of GTA. WTF!!!!!

There is certainly something wrong in HD land if you have to count on Carnival Games and a handheld version of GTA to "rescue" you from selling 13 million copies of your flagship game. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory. Apparently some publishers can't make money with a printing press [although the owners can since they walked away with millions in stock - good thing the DS was there to make that stock worth something].

Given that type of bizarre universe, there probably is NO rule that always applies. In such a fantasia a Wii game can even cost as much as a HD one. Still, it is a little disingenuous to leave the impression on the table that such parity is anywhere close to the norm. Quite a few publishers and other industry insiders have gone on record with estimates of the difference between Wii and HD games.
THQ president Brian Farrell - 2x to 4x
EA boss John Riccitiello - 3x to 4x
Japanese Industry Report  2.5x (2x 360 - 3x PS3)
Colin Sebastian, video game industry analyst - 2x to 4x
Scott A. Steinberg, Sega marketing VP - 2x - 3.5x
Kelly Flock, THQ Exec. VP THQ - $1.5-4m vs $10-12m (2.5x to 8x)
San Francisco Chronicle - $5m vs $20m+ (4x+)

The figure has mostly fallen somewhere between 2x and 4x difference in development costs. I personally don't recall a single example of any estimate below 2x. If I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll be corrected in the next few seconds.

I'm just saying that it'll vary wildly from game to game. Especially with games like World at War where nearly all of the assets outside of graphics are reused across all versions. (voice acting, sound work, story, writing, level design, etc.)

Even if the numbers you posted, you have people from THQ disagreeing with each other.

Marketing costs, the same as movies having separate costs for production and marketing.

These estimates, as imperfect as they are show that development costs have a significant impact in the types of sales numbers that most games actually achieve. One figure often quoted in trade literature is that only 3 in 10 games ever recover their cost.  Can this be reconciled with the cost estimates.

I took the most conservative development cost ratio of 2 to 1 between HD and Wii and the most often quoted estimate on unit sales necessary to recover cost of 500K (HD) and 250K (Wii). I used the VG Chartz game list but included only games with sales greater than 0.0, to eliminate the pile of canceled, upcoming or rumored games that fill up the bottom of the list.

These figures would seem to indicate that while a few more games have been profitable on the Wii, a developer has approximately equal odds of creating a profitable game on the Xbox360 or the Wii. Only about half the bank-roll is required to try your hand on the Wii, hence its popularity with smaller and indie developers. The odds look significantly worse on the PS3 especially considering that it is generally regarded as being more expensive to develop for than the Xbox 360.

Now taking the total for all three consoles, how well do these estimates correlate to a 3/10 industry wide success rate?

The surprisingly perfect agreement means that the minimum sales estimates may be reasonable accurate.