I hate to nitpick at your post, but I have to ask what Nintendo would have to do under your line of thinking to prove they are reaching out? If every third part win they get is "just because of user base and cost" by default even then its pretty hard for it to ever appear as if they are providing support.

We don't really have a lot of info in this area tbh, I think the volume and quality of games is about the most reliable thing we have to go on since I don't think I would trust a company to give me straight info when their game sales are riding on the issue.

edit: BTW the reliability of the writer went out the window for me when he said this in his opening comments....

"This is clearly going to be the best year in video game history. NPD is predicting $17 billion to $18 billion for the year. The question is whether this is a temporary Halo 3 bubble or it just keeps on getting better from here on out."

Sorry but Wii hardware sales has far more to do with increased revenue than Halo 3 does. A quick calculation shows that Wii hardware accounts for $1,287,500,000 in revenue this year in the US alone and if we assume it can sell another 2m units that number will rise to $1,787,500,000. AKA more than 10% for just the Wii hardware.  Halo 3 is a big boost to revenue, no doubt about it.  But to try and say that the current increases are due to Halo 3 when it only just came out and clearly couldn't of accounted for the increase up to this point?....well lets just say its a bit rediculous and clearly shows his bias up front without need to surf his site to prove it even further.

The entire problem with PS3 development is it costs so much money and man power. Often to get just the same results you get on 360. Anyone remember the same on N64?

No, not really.  :)

Look at GTA4. The real reason we all know it's put back is because of PS3. If it were 360 game alone it would be out this year.

If you think Sony isn't buying exclusives then you're only fooling yourself.  Why would any third parties make third person shooters PS3 exclusive for example when there are much larger 360 and PC markets at the moment for them and especially with the PS3's monthly sales?  Do you really think Haze became exclusive to the PS3 and the other two versions dropped because Ubisoft felt that it would get the most sales on the PS3 and wouldn't sell on the 360 and PC or that UT3 becoming a timed exclusive on the PS3 had absolutely nothing to do with Sony giving Epic a moneyhat to improve the UT3 engine on their system?

I'll believe it when I see a link to a real quote from a Sony executive. Otherwise its just interpretation.

I don't think any Sony executive is going to come out and say they're pleading with third party developers not to abandon their struggling platform even if that's what they were/are doing.  I doubt even third parties would say anything about it since they would have nothing to gain from it.

I just wanted to comment on the 4 to 5 Wii development teams for ever PS3 development team ...

Gamasutra has been doing portmortems on games for a decade and (rarely) they tell you the total development cost but you can (typically) get some idea of the expense from these articles:

	Rogue Leader Publisher: Lucas Arts Entertainment Number of full-time developers: 30 Number of contractors: 2 Estimated budget: $3.5 million Length of development: 9 months Release date: November 8, 2001 Platform: Nintendo Gamecube Development hardware used: GDEV & 1GHz PC, running Windows 2000 Development software used: SN Systems for Gamecube, Slickedit, Maya Notable technologies: MusyX 2.0 Project size: 14.2MB of source in 859 files, in-game source data 6.4GB in 10,075 files

(NOTE: 30 Developers, 9 Months, $3.5 Million which is much higher than my $100,000 per developer per year estimate)

	Jak & Daxter: the Precursor Legacy Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Number of full-time developers: 35 Length of development: 1 year of initial development, plus 2 years of full production Release date: December, 2001 Platform: Playstation 2 Development software used: Allegro, Common Lisp, Visual C++, Maya, Photoshop, X Emacs, Visual Slick Edit, tcsh, Exceed, CVS

	TRON 2.0 Publisher: Buena Vista Interactive Number of full-time developers: 21 Number of part-time developers: 4 - 5 pulled in as needed plus the use of Monolith's internal sound, music, and motion capture facilities and personnel. Contractors: Cinematic music scoring, motion capture actors, voice actors Length of development: 2 years Release Date: August 26, 2003 Target Platform: PC Development Hardware: Pentium 1.0 - 2.0 GHz machines with 256 - 512MB RAM, GeForce 1 - 4 video cards Development Software: Lithtech DEdit/ModelEdit, Microsoft Visual Studio (C++), Photoshop, Maya, Editplus 2 Notable Technologies: Lithtech Jupiter Development System Project Size: 2,400 files, 853,300 lines of code

Now, being that Wii development is on a similar scale to Gamecube, PS2 and XBox development I think these games are representative of Wii development costs. Unfortunately, we only have 1 postmortem from an XBox 360/PS3 game (MotoGP07) which doesn't list the number of employees; one thing I have seen mentioned about several games is development teams of 80 to 200 people working for (at least) 2 years.

 Yes, but I'd like to see the graphics difference. Wasn't it with XBOX that they were having trouble  fitting the game on DVD?

OPM: On PS3 you've got a guarantee that every machine is going to have a hard-drive and, with Blu-ray, you've got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there's no guarantee of a hard-drive and you're working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?

Houser: Yep.

 Both consoles have their problems, they're not both perfect.

http://ps3.qj.net/Rockstar-having-problems-with-360-s-limited-capacity-/pg/49/aid/91184

I think it's impossible to calculate a budget based on the number of people working on a game simply because it's hard to tell how many of the people working on it are working for outside contractors.

For example there are companies in India that have what amounts to digital sweatshops where row after row of computer artists work in shifts making graphic assets for games. These people get paid a lot less than Western employees and because there are so many of them the companies are able to deliver work at much less cost.

So when a developer says that they have 150 or 200 or whatever number of people working on their game 50-100 (or possibly more) or those people may actually be those from the contractor. Don't get me wrong though I'm not saying all games with large numbers of people working on them do that but some definitely do.

Note: (Here's an example of some contractors and I'm not claiming any of these have sweatshops like the one I mentioned above (but there definitely is at least one out there like that...) http://www.gamasutra.com/contractwork/gameproduction.php)