It's 350K plus 50K per additional platform + 3% royalaty now. 

You can still liscense unreal engine 2.  It used to be more... it went down after a while.

Still it is prety telling.

I think the ratio is too big. The reason I used such a ratio myself in the OP is that I was comparing a game like bloom blox to something like prototype...which is somewhat unfair.

@thread

It's nice to see more people getting the point I was trying to make because the way I see it now is that after the original in-house engines have been finalized, additional dev costs on any platform are the choice of the developer because they don't have to best killzone 2's graphics. fanboy mutterings on the internet don't mean diddly-squat.

Looking at things from this perspective, devs have no one to blame but themselves for the fact that they're losing money and it's not because they avoided the wii either.

The issue that may arise regrding ps360 development if devs stop the graphics superiority race is simple: would these "graphically-inferior" games sell? From the evidence available, one would think the answer is no because games like Valkyria Chronicles, The Club etc, haven't moved mountains. The problem now shifts to audience and quality. The audience of an SRPG is pretty small so I don't think VC had a chance to achieve any sort of breakthrough sales. As for something like The Club, it was just a bad game in a genre saturated with high quality titles that people haven't even gotten around to purchasing. (Note that extremely graphics-intensive games aren't guaranteed super sales either)

I personally think the answer is yes but I don't have evidence, outside my own purchase priorities, to back up my claim. I really think that if a game of FFX quality had released on ps360 now as-is, it would still sell millions (this is assuming the original ffx doesn't exist as the new game would be rejected for being a clone if that's the case). The problem devs now have is coming up with fresh ideas that would interest consumers and if they aren't very creative, the time they waste doing that extra brainstorming may end up equaling the cost of making the graphics-intensive clone game from the start. The only difference is that the game would be "lucky" because "brainstorm time" won't be factored into it's cost. Also, these factors don't necessarily favor a switch to wii development because it's also important to note where one's target audience are

The reason Wii development is cheaper is because to make an HD game in the same time frame as games in past gens it takes a much larger staff then it once did, the Wii however takes a similar team size as last gen to develop a good game, smaller teams means either more games on the market or cheaper costs which ever the developer and publisher decide on is their best route.

Bottom line is, because it takes a smaller team to make a quality Wii effort the development costs on Wii are significantly cheaper, there is no way to argue with that...

read through the thread, you'll see that all isn't set in stone. I really don't want to repeat points that have already been made

you need far less people, less time and resources for a wii project. besides wii development is simillar to gamecube development so it's well known and there are many engines that are cheap nowadays that can be tweaked and ported to wii easilly. just look at Marvelous Entertainment or Atlus games sales and their expectations - if wii game hit 150-200k they already will make profit. hell for ds games they have somethin like 40-120k LTD expectations - and i'm talking about full blown 3d jrpgs like Steal Princess which has voice acting, anime/cgi cutscenes and so on(i mean they're not cheaply made cash-ins).

How is this thread still going?

Wii is easier to develop for because it's older tech and can't show as much on screen which minimises the art which means it's quicker to make which means that game doesn't take as long to make which means that employees were paid less than for the HD game because they weren't working on that particular game for as long on Wii which means that Wii game costed less.

It doesn't matter that they still get paid afterwards on a new game, all that matters is that the Wii game costed less while it was being made compared to the HD game.

How is that all that matters? Is it fanboyism that blinds? I'm looking at the cost of development to the publisher as a whole if they switched totally to wii development as opposed to HD development. Some of you really need to read some intelligent posts made earlier. If ithe whole situation was as simple as petz costs less than PoP, I won't have bothered creating this thread

I read it all, and I still think that making PoP on Wii would cost less than the exact same game on a HD system because Wii simply can't handle the same amount of things on screen. It's also got a coding environment that would be quicker and easier to get a grasp on and develop for. It'd take less people thus less money for the exact same title.

It's up to the developers then if they want to put that extra cash towards marketing or if you're a dev with not a lot of cash then Wii may be your only option.

I understand what you're trying to say and the thread has done a very good job of convincing people. Yes as a whole the developer would either be able to downsize or make more games. The fact that you say you put qualifiers on your OP such as without layoffs means that you're pretty much not ready to debate this.

Wii game: less people or less hours = cheaper
HD game: more people or more hours = more expensive

So to answer the thread topic. Yes.

Then if the developer decides to go for Wii exclusive development then they can make more titles. I think it'd be stupid to go Wii only development as one post already explained, you need to diversify but the topic asks if dev costs on Wii are cheaper and I said yes they are.


I think EA have the best system right now. 50% goes to Wii, 50% goes to PS3/360. We know that to make a multiplat game for the HD consoles is only 10% more than to make it for only one of the systems. We also know that Wii titles sell better when they are high quality or exclusive. EA are launching Grand Slam Tennis exclusively for Wii this June and haven't been stingy with their money. This title has all the big names in Tennis and also has Wimbledon. They were able to spend that amount of money on an exclusive title because they didn't have to create a huge amount of High Definition character models and textures and because they didn't have to code for audience movements and sweat and all these little 'HD console extras'. If they were making Grand Slam Tennis a 360 exclusive with perfect character models and all the licencing, how much would you expect it to cost them?

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10.. Wii is the lead console. It STILL probably costs less for them to make that title compared with the HD game.


So is it cheaper to develop for only the DS? Is it cheaper to develop only for the PS3? Only for 360? Only for PSP?

If you understood the points we were making before, you'll know that HD provides FLEXIBILITY. No one is forced to release max graphics...it's a CHOICE devs make knowing the lengthy dev times and thus cost that follows. So exactly why can't the game be made with max wii graphics (i.e less particles) and released on PS360 anyway? It's the ideology thats the problem here. Making multiple Petz games for wii is not the solution, I'd reiterate

The point here is that no console is intrinsically more expensive to develop for. It's all about how devs choose to ration their resources. If GTAIV had been a wii game, it'll probably still cost over 70 million dollars because I don't see anything too special about the graphics and it's most costly component was marketing by far (which would be constant for any game on any system). It's just like how wii fit is cheap on paper but with the amount of advertising it still gets, I won't be surprised if it actually costs as much as killzone 2 by now.