I am just curious about the production costs of a high quality wii game like Mad World, or Super Mario Galaxy.  I know they are low, but since some of the third party hardcore games aren't doing as well as i would have hoped, I am wondering how many titles they need to sell worldwide to be profitable. 

It's about the same as a last gen game.

twesterm, about how much does the typical N dev make after fees and everything?

No idea, that's something varies from game to game depending on contracts, team size, time, sales, and other things I'm sure I'm not remembering.

Hmm, ok then.

I'll give it a shot.
Nintendo makes about 8+ in licensing fees.
about 15-20 goes to the retailers.

So for a 50$ game, the devs make about 32+$
Then you need to factor in dev costs and so forth.
it probably comes to about 6$ profit per game.

I think most wii games require about 300-400k sales to turn profit, so that would mean they cost maybe 2-4M, high quality ones being the latter, or maybe about 6M or so.

You have that line of reasoning backwards. It should go "it costs X, therefore it needs to sell Y," not "it needs to sell Y, therefore it must cost X".

good analyzing. now do my calculus homework :P

You've left out publishers. And I'm assuming you're lumping in distributors with retailers?

True, but we rarely get any information about X. We do however get some good clues as to Y most of the time. Reggie himself said that Wii games don't need to sell anywhere near a million to make profit, and deblob had profit at I think 400k if I remember at all correctly

there's a lot of different places that get money ebfore they do. In Europe it's even worse because they have additional costs.

I think the profit number is close to accurate, although in some cases the dev only makes like 1$ for the first 100k or so.