Oh man, how am I ever going to turn a profit on my self developed/distributed wii titles? Guess it's back to the fields for me.

Well, in comparison with a bunch of other sites I am pretty proud of the VGChartz community for seeing through this so quickly.

Proves that sanity has its place in the internet, and it is here ... at least some of the time!

Wait a minute, are you saying the kids on the neo gaf aren't sane? The kids on "the preeminent video game industry discussion community." Cause I'm pretty sure they are the most calm, educated, and rational people around. And they're never wrong, ever.

That's terrible, Ninjabread Man may never break even!

That sounds reasonnable I think the most commonly quoted number is that publishers get around 25$ per HD game sold so I would say actually around 800k to break even.

The number are probably around 17-18$ per copy sold for Wii games.

If you say a good Wii game costs 10 million to make ( not shovelware but like a real game)( including marketing) that would put the number of units you need to sell a little over 590k.

For a Wii game to need to sell 1 million units to break even the game would need to cost 17-18 million $....

NYT is probably quoting someone they know that knows someone that interviewed Reggie.

You're missing the point. Yes, everything looks "better" in higher resolutions (well, sharper, though it also makes for a jagged appearence on large monitors without anti-aliasing), but enabling HD development would essentially jack up development costs as developers struggle to implement the feature - by removing HD development, Nintendo very deliberately forced a smaller budget for most games. Again, it doesn't matter what games would look like in HD - what matter is that developers don't spend money trying to take full advantage of it.

Also, I have no doubt Nintendo profited from the lower production costs, but (at best, from your perspective) that only makes Reggie's statement a half-truth, not a falsehood.

Too bad the correction will not see anywhere near the same amount of coverage.

@Helios

Actually the higher the resolution the less jagged is the result. You're thinking about upscaling a low resolution image, I'm talking about rendering in HD. It also has the nice sideeffect of providing MSAA for SD, so even at 480p the image would be better.

As for development costs, I can't see your point. If a developer wants to spend 40M dollars on an HD Wii game and then fails to do profit, that's their bad business choice. Same as if today they spent 40M dollars in developing an incredibly niche RPG on 8 DVDs, and then it sells poorly. How would that influence the developers who decide to keep spending 10M and make money? The Wii proved that it can sell enough of those visually simpler games to its owners.

The only reason to cut HD would be if taking advantage of it necessarily meant higher costs. The emulator rendering disproves that: there would be some free added value for software developers if Nintendo made a different choice.