since so many of you joined the discussion, let me ask my question again... How does third party ensure coming up with a high quality game?

Also, how do you define AAA games?

When everyone refers to AAA games, I think they are referring to games which receive the attention of the best teams within a company, and is accompanied by a large budget, for both development and advertisement purposes.  Note that this is all relative to the company's own track record and resources available, so an AAA game coming out of Capcom would inevitably differ in these measurements from an AAA game coming out of High Voltage Software.  Basically, it's not so much the critical acclaim that decides whether a game earns the label (unfortunately), but instead how much is riding on the game's success.

If you're talking about a "High Quality" game as in a game that is fun to play and has enough content to keep people interested I think I have something to say on that ...

If you did a comparison between studios that had a track record of producing good games and a studio that had a track record of producing mediocre games there are a few things that you would probably notice that was causing the quality difference. The thing that would (probably) surprise most people is that the higher quality studio didn’t really have more intelligent, creative or talented developers than the lower quality studio; and one of the primary reasons why games where lower quality was that the developers at the mediocre studio were always in a rush and could spend no time doing anything to their potential.

Now, there are a few reasons why the developers at the mediocre studio were always rushed ... In many cases it would be that the project was not well thought out ahead of time and developers were forced to do too much rework, the team fell far behind and were going over budget, and the company's hard deadline and strict budget left little room for movement. In other cases a game is simply not expected to sell all that well and the budget is set at a level where there really is no money to do things well.

A company like Nintendo can reliably produce a "AAA" Zelda or Mario game because the structure of the game is fairly well known, they have prototyped and tested most of the gameplay mechanics long before it hits a full production stage, management is competent and can handle the scope of these projects, the team is experienced, and the budget and development time is flexable enough to allow for everyone to do their best work.

You explain the success of CoD on Wii by pointing out that publishers have said that a game on the 360/PS3 has to sell 6 times as many copies as the Wii to earn the same amount of money as a Wii game.

I'll bite.  Could you post a list of publishers that have said that.  If anyone is claiming that the 1 million copies of CoD:WaW on Wii generates as much profit as 6 million on an HD console I'm calling bullshit now.

In this case, here is what I don't understand.(not direct to you, Kenny)

How does CoD:W@W qualify as AAA game on Wii? It didn't receive the attention of the best teams within the company, and is not accompanied by a large budget, for both development and advertisement purposes.

That's a very good explanation, HappySqurriel.

My point was actually directed to the comment below in the article.

Thus, in some sense you have more control over your fate on the 360/PS3 if you can come up with a high-quality game. Whereas on the Wii, it's a bit of a crapshoot for what works and what doesn't.

My view is that there is a good chance for any game to sell good regardless platform (PS/360/Wii) if you spend the time and money to develope a high-quality game. Of course there is a chance the high-quality title wouldn't sell as expected (Prince of Persia, Mirror's Edge) but I don't know any console that doesn't have high quality "flops". (If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know)