If we compare EA's efforts on the wii to their efforts on PS360, it's pretty obvious why this is the case. If they made fresh dead space that actually pushes the performance of the wii like it did the PS360, I'd like to see how much that costs. No one held them in a chokehold forcing them to optimize the graphical capabilities of PS360's dead space. You can't just compare Dead Space to bloom blox and use that as an argument. Dead Space even got minor advertising on game sites while bloom blox got nothing.

If devs have the idea that such genres only sell great with extreme graphics, why not focus on others. We don't even have proof that this is the case because in many of these cases, low end graphics usually equals low production values all round. i still play old ps2/ps1 games and I'd be the first to tell you that great games are just that...great games. Some are improved as graphics improve but extreme HD killzone 2 style is unnecessary.

It's nice to not have to see blocky hands like cloud's in FFvii but I don't think anyone would complain if smaller studios stayed at FFX graphic levels (which are detailed enough even today) if their games are as great as it was.

In my eyes, the solution is simple: make what you can afford. If your game is good, non-killzone 2 graphics won't kill sales.

Probably so. But it will be interesting to see if the availability of cheap tools like the Pyre engine, or other middleware, will at least bring forth a number of niche or casual games with a sustainable profit.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's because it's what sells these days... and also because most developers aren't innovative enough.

Your solution could work, but not in a market where the biggest (and often only) innovation most developers have to offer in a new iteration of a franchise is the better graphics. This of course exacerbated by reviewers (who will surely point out that the graphics are antiquated, not to say unacceptable), and perhaps the demographics involved.

I suspect this debate is largely academic though, because I really don't see many publishers going back in terms of graphics on the PS3 and 360.

If thats the path they choose then they can't eat their cake and have it. The whining has to come to an end if thats the case. As for game reviews, I'm not too sure how those reflect significant purchase decisions so those are pretty much useless.

The other thing is: even knowing that developing on the Wii is much cheaper, how much will moving to the Wii be affordable once the development mostly happens at the higher end of the spectrum?

Let's say that a lot of developers move to develop good, AAA exclusives on the Wii. I suppose that a miniature version of the arms race will happen again.
Thus, a studio going for a big game will spend $20M on the Wii instead that $40M on the PS3. If they had gone multiplatform on the HD consoles they would have spent +20% bringing it to $48M.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but can we count about $10 revenue per copy on the Wii and $15 per copy on the PS3/360?
Because in that case the break even points become 2M copies on the Wii, 3.2M copies on 360+PS3. I don't see that big of an advantage for the studio.

As Pristine20 says, it looks like it's more a problem of how you want to position your game in the budget range than simply on which platform you want to work.

@WereKitten: The arms race doesn't go that far... You don't see publishers spending $100 million like Take Two allegedly did on GTA4.

I wouldn't be surprised if Super Mario Galaxy cost more than $15 million, maybe even more than $20 million (not counting marketing), but such a game is really the exception on the platform, like GTA4 is. It has lots of content besides being technically great.

@NJ5
That's why I asked if we have absolute costs for high-end Wii projects.
The trouble is that I see very easily costs on the Wii ramping up to $20M if the developers bring with them the features common on high-end projects on the HD consoles. After all CGI and motion capture will cost the same on the Wii, and same goes for the marketing campaigns that an AAA title sort of requires.

^^This is a question that i'd like to see posed to High Voltage. They seem to be pretty open about the whole development process and The Conduit would certainly appear to be on the upper end of the Wii scale in terms of scope.

One thing that Wii games will never need is HD quality visuals.  As said above in the thread, the higher definition artwork that is needed takes a lot of extra time.