Haze was advertised because it was thought to have "Halo" potential if people only knew about it. I get the feeling that sony did the marketing though so that wouldn't have added to it's cost to Ubi. I don't get the idea that wii games won't need advertising because they are cheaper. IMO, 3rd party wii games don't get advertised so they can stay cheap. Marketing costs tend to rack up quick.

The whole CGI stuff is just moot. It's all about manhours and salaries. You don't seem to "get" the root cost of development. Read Shams post, he's a developer and he confirms what I consider the true cost of development in my OP. CGI = more time in. If extra levels were taken out to make time for CGI, it won't necessarily cost more. All that other stuff is technology that the studio already possesses.

This year EA Sports Active will get a marketing push of $10 Million from EA which is the same amount that Madden gets each year for marketing over every platform.

Huge amount for a third party Wii title and I think this is what devs should do with money saved from the development costs of Wii games.

First off, I completely understand where development costs come from ... I was one of the first people (years ago) to suggest the $100,000 per developer per year estimate for development costs due to the salaries, benefits and associated costs with keeping someone employed; although, it can cost more (in some cases $150,000 per developer per year) if the team is in a particularly expensive city, where everything from salaries to office costs can be dramatically higher.

Companies like Epic have kept costs down by offshoring a lot of work to studios in China, where for (less than) 1/4 the cost you can get a similarly talented developer ... In most (successful) cases of offshoring that I have heard of the work that is offshored is the creation of artistic assets that are (primarily) used to populate the environment; for example, you would get your chineese studio to model and texture a trash-can which can then be place in the environment by your level designer.

Now, Haze was a game where (it seems like) the publisher forced the game out the door because development had taken too long and the developer was far over budget. This game was then supported by a marketing budget that seemed to be far larger than any non multi-million selling Ubisoft game (I can think of) and (about) the only reason that I can think of for this was that Ubisoft thought that the only way they could (come close) to break even was to throw enough money into marketing that the game would sell well enough ...

At the same time, there have been a few publishers that defended their lack of marketing for certain Wii games by claiming that the marketing budget is primarily determined by the game's budget ...

There is nothing saying that HD console games have-to cost more than Wii games (or that Wii games have-to cost more than an N64 game), after all they could stick to similar geometric detail and texture detail (with higher resolution models and textures to limit artifacts), with similar texture effects, as games produced for the PS2/Wii and output these games at a higher resolution and it shouldn't cost dramatically more than a Wii game ... Unfortunately, we haven't seen any developer take this approach, potentially because they're afraid that the HD console market really does only care about how a game looks (from a technical perspective)/

@Plaupius
Sorry if my table was misleading, it was not meant to be.
My rationale was simply to index the table using each version's sales. As in: I code an FPS that I think will potentially sell about 2.5M on each of the HD platforms on average (most probably skewed towards 360 sales). How does this fare against selling the same on the Wii?

You say: how come you can treat each version as if it had roughly the same sale projection. The install base of the Wii is approx. the same as 360+Ps3, but the effective target market depends on the game genre. For FPSs for example up to this point it has been proven that the Wii market responds less than each HD console. This can obviously still be disproven if, say, the conduit manages to sell more than a good FPS on PS3 or 360.

Speaking in general I don't think it's too wrong to assume that about half of the Wii owners belong to the "extended audience". That audience will be interested only in a little number of the AAA big games we're talking about here such as some platformers and simple racers and sports games, but not into the majority of them (think Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, western RPGs, mature shooters, complex adventure games, race sims), thus I took an "effective market" for the Wii of about the size of each HD console, with the caveat as I stated of games that you know will sell well to the Wii demographics,ie also to the extended audience.

Under this assumption, it was reasonable to make that table. If you don't think the assumption is valid, you can still read it, just remember what each column means.

With shams numbers ($18.5 vs $14), I can update my table to this:

Just for reference: the break even sales are about 1.43M on the Wii, 2.59M on PS3+360 (1.29M average and on my table)

And double check your math about HD needing 7-8M sales more, it is wrong. The correct one is

Profit Wii= $14*sales Wii -$20M= Profit HD = $18.5*sales HD -$48M

=> sales HD = sales Wii *14/18.5 +28M/18.5 = 0.76 * sales Wii + 1.51M

So say that a Wii game sells 2.5M, then the same profit ($15M) will require about 3M HD sales (in total between PS3 and 360)

 Where'd you get the estimate on SMG?

I read an estimate a while back that put Mario Galaxy at $19 Million.. Still in the same general ballpark figure though

that, is pretty cheap vs the amount of money it made and the quality of the game. no wonder Nintendo has the best 1st party devs o_O

6 pages of people giving you the correct asnwer and you're still going?

It's really simple. Few people are required to make a standard Wii game versus a standard PS3/X360 game. No hidden mysteries, no if this, if that BS, no considering these irrelevant factors....it's simply that. Fewer people required per average title.

i lol'ed considering that most expensive wii game so far was Red Steel that costed 12.75mln$(and most of the money took Unreal Engine 2.5) and it was said that 12.75mln$ was this project whole budget - so there you have development costs, ads and so on(considwering that nintendo made most RS ads ubisoft didn't do much). now please name me a single hd retail game that had just the development costs at that level? there's none cause most of those games are 20-25mln$ and more.

besides super mario galaxy needed only about 250k sales to make profit if we can believe in what nintendo is saying.

^Lair costed about that much to develop, actually (12-15M).

update: apparently this was only the scheduled cost, but it probably balooned as the game got delayed. I'll see if I can find other data about games that came out in the same timeframe. I suspect that's the ballpark for the time.

And SMG is first party, so obviously Nintendo makes more on each copy. But if it costed 20M then there's no way it could break even at 250k sales. More about 0.8-1M, probably. Link to your source?

Anyway, we're talking third party here.