"Whereas on the Wii, it's a bit of a crapshoot for what works and what doesn't."

True that, normal games don't work on the wii, if Metroid only did 1.5 million 3rd party's cant expect any better.

Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition 1.55m

Sonic and the Secret Rings 2.02m

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga 2.40m

Guitar Hero: World Tour 2.79m

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock  4.12m

You were saying?

Watch the friendly fire, mate.

There seem to be quite a few people who think that anything published on the Wii, or that focusing development dollars on the platform equates to the highest return on investment, and presumably the most sensible path to profitability as game developers.

While I think his words may have been taken out of context, Fils-Aime was recently quoted in the NY Times as saying it takes about a million units sold for a title to turn a profit on the Wii.

I'm guessing he meant Nintendo published/developed titles as they tend to take longer to produce, and presumably take more resources to develop.

But the assumption that other games developed for the Wii made a profit, regardless of sales, because "it was really cheap to develop anyway," is just that: an assumption.

Development dollars for the PS3/360/PC, while unquestionably higher, still represent a larger (but not necessarily broader) potential buyer base. This is most likely why we're still seeing virtually no change in game publishing trends with respect to big budget games, despite the success of the Wii in the console market.

User base demographics are more important than simple market share in this respect. So lead developing on the Wii (because is has half the console market) makes virtually no sense for many publishers given the target audiences for their games. The other half of the console market, with a fair share of overlap with the PC market, does not see the Wii as a primary platform for their gaming or we'd be seeing higher sales with respect to third party titles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/technology/30game.html?_r=1

"Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, said publishers of games for its Wii console needed to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit. He said that was a lower threshold than for the other consoles. Only 16 out of 486 games for Nintendo Wii game machines have sold more than one million units as of March 1, according to NPD, which tracks the sales of consumer products. (Nine of the best sellers are made by Nintendo.)

Mr. Fils-Aime said Nintendo recognized the economics were changing when it developed the Wii. He said the company deliberately did not add high-definition capability to the Wii so games would be cheaper to make. "

That's an interesting point.  Do we actually know the costs of making a game like CoD:WaW, Metroid Prime 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld, or The Conduit on the Wii, or are we just assuming that its in the same "1/4th as much" ballpark that all the shovelware is?  Does the marketing and manufacturing cost 1/4 as much on the Wii as well, and does it garner the same revenue per unit sold?

Takes a lot of work to turn a profit.  Having 5-8x the sales numbers must be a nice place to start.

There was a big discussion on that quote a while back and it turns out Reggie was misquoted and a correction was made.

I wonder where these idiots breed.

It's a good thing to notice that the addressable market share is growing all the time. When Harrison left Sony, it was only 40% and now it's 50% when counting in some 3rd party games.

The real stupidity was the assumption that the people who buy 1st party games only buy 1st party games (and Guitar Hero and Rockband owners buy only Guitar Hero and Rockband).

In the end, using the logic in question, if we count out all the big publishers, or every publisher that is not "you", how much addressable market share do we have left on any platform.
One of the major reasons why Nintendo is so successful is, that they're not falling into holes like the one in the OP.

@rol
it would be just as well if he said that the other 70% was GH or RB.

"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."

how do you ensure coming up with a high quality game? I'm sure Silicon Knight and Free Radical both thought they had high quality games in Too Human and Haze.

At this point I'm just waiting to see what publishers go bankrupt and which ones don't. Most of them are clearly willing to go mostly on the same path that has made them fail so far.