Did you read what the Unreal Engine does?  Do you know what a videogame engine is?

Game Engines don't cost the same on HD consoles as they do the Wii.

Also

http://www.payscale.com/research/CN/Job=Software_Engineer_%2F_Developer_%2F_Programmer/Salary

1 CNY = 0.14 U.S. dollars

So your average Chinese programmer makes about $13,500 at optimium pay.

So you save about $60,000 per programmer per year.

Yes, they are. Capcom has said they moved Monster Hunter 3 to the Wii due to higher PS3 development costs:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/high-ps3-costs-prompt-capcom-to-move-to-wii

Someone from Polyphony Digital has also said PS3 development is much more expensive than PS2 development, due to higher detail in the car models:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/12/kazunori-yamauchi-dishes-more-gran-turismo-5-details.ars

Surely the Wii is between PS2 and PS3 in terms of costs.

There's also THQ:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149154.html

And the famous graph from Factor 5:

http://i32.tinypic.com/10glffn.jpg

@Esa-Petteri

Are you purposely being obtuse or do you really not know what a game engine is and what it does?

A large, extremely high end HD engine like Unreal 3 is a hell of a lot more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to develop than a SD engine.

Its common practice for engine developers to create essentially a glorified game/depo to showcase their engines under the idea that demonstrating it works a lot better for marketing it than putting out a brochure. This same reason why is Crytek developed Crysis, it was to showcase and market the Crytek engine. The money they make from selling the game is just the bonus.

Thats why they advertised it was only 10 mil, because they are saying to their prospective clients to "BUY THIS ENGINE AND ONLY SPEND 10 MIL!". A lot of the costs of KZ2 also went into making the engine.

Epic likely made more money from licensing the Unreal engine than they did from selling GeOW (though reusing the engine for GeOW2 and likely GeOW3 would increase those profits).

In any case, you all forgot the costs of creating high definition assets. Go search in my post history, there's a link to polyphony stating that the time it takes to render a car model for GT went from ~couple of weeks in PS2 to ~6 months per car on the PS3. That is where all your extra time and money went.

Likely nothing.  They make something like 1 Million a liscense i hear.  I think like over 100 games have liscensed the thing.

@darconi: The quote from Polyphony Digital about the cost of making car models for GT5 is in one of the links I posted. Here it is:

The number of people, on this site, who believe that good games will come to the Wii via some magical "Wii development is cheap" reasoning is astounding. Free lunch much? Have your cake and eat it too? Come on you guys. Some common sense to read between the lines here.

This is a silly discussion, and a totally bogus one, from the spin Nintendo, and Nintendo fanboys like to put on it. Wii games ARE cheaper, on average, that's a fact. Wii games are rated MUCH lower by critics, on average, another fact.

When you take the tiny moment it takes to see through the PR smoke, the likely ~50% it takes to develop a serious effort on the Wii (not 1/4 -- what a joke. Look up "average" in the dictionary, and then count the number of shovelware titles available on the Wii), relative to a serious effort HD console, is outweighed by the fact that any serious marketing effort, and reduced revenue per unit, not to mention demographic scatter, etc. will balance the numbers in the end for the publishers.

It is very difficult for a publisher to target a large enough demographic on the Wii, unless they shoot at the "casual" genres. That's why they don't spend big bucks on other games, and that's why they like to blow Nintendo's horn, and pretend they are supporting the Wii fanbase, by touting the Wii's cheap average dev costs (in the past) as reasons to develop on it.

Ask yourself, if the Wii is so easy to develop for, so cheap, why don't we see more high-end games for the Wii, from 3rd parties? Surely the mere pennies they have to spend on the awesomeness of a Wii title will yield pure gold? Or has it? Is it, instead, likely that the reason Wii games rate so much lower, on average, is that, on average, less is spent on creating them -- I think so.

Publishers are struggling with Wii profits, because of the shovelware efforts on the Wii, plain and simple. I think we can name about as much "w00t, we got lucky" titles on the Wii as we can on PSN and XBL. Publishers can't rely on lucky breaks to succeed in the long-term.

The "Wii development is cheap, on average" argument is moot. All shovelware is cheap, on average. This has nothing to do with the Wii itself.  If publishers actually believed the drivel about dirt-cheap Wii development themselves, we'd see nothing but shovelware on the Wii, and if it was true, the publishers would be rich already, and Wii games would largely be lauded as being spectacular, not crap.

Is low-budget shovelware what you really want, as a Wii owner?  End the ridiculous "develop on the Wii, because its cheap" reasoning now, if you don't.  Go with "develop on the Wii, because the Wii is popular", because that's the reason the publishers should start spending some money on individual Wii titles.