Over the past few days i've been reading the news mainly from gdc and people from the industry saying that it's difficult to make more risks now in nex-gen, mainly for two reasons: the need to spend money on showing the power of HD, and the reluctance on spending that lot of money in new games no one knows if they will succeed. Can Little Big Adventure be a million seller, for example? Viva Piñata failed on that attempt, didn't? Will the publishers start risking more on the Wii in cost-contained productions?

If you change the second half of that last sentence, I think the chance of me having to lock this later after becoming a flame war would decrease exponentially.

Publishers might if the console continues to sell at good levels and 3rd party software sells better than on GC. If those two conditions can be met, you can expect many experimental and risky titles on Wii. The 3rd required element, cost of production, has obviously already been addressed.

Publishers never take risks; they’re large corporations who produce games based on the business case for making the game. Basically, for every game that is made they have someone crunch the numbers and a game is made if projected development cost + (projected development cost x desired profit margin) =* projected revenues. *{or less than} Now, ”Risky” games end up having lower projected revenues and ”Next Generation” games end up having a much higher projected development cost; the result is that it is very difficult to make a business case for a ”Risky Next Generation” game. You will never change this, the only thing that will probably change is what is considered a ”Risky” game.

Rephrasing that, it's not mainly the cost. It's the focus. And the focus is where you spend more money. From what I've seen and read, a game for ps3 and 360 must be stunning otherwise it will have much more difficulties being 'accepted'. If for the Wii one thinks first "How are we going to use the wiimote?", for the other two it's more "Look at that screens". These are shortcomings for games, being prejudged by one part of it, and not the whole.