Raise the retail price to $60.

This will have a monumental impact on the available budgets for Wii titles, from 3rd party devs -- especially if Nintendo doesn't hike their licensing fees as well.

Budget is everything, when it comes to making a quality game, on the Wii or otherwise.  Yes, past a certain point, extra investment suffers from "diminishing returns", but that breaking point, in this day and age, is a fair bit higher than the typical Wii title's budget.

If the return was decent, the investment would be worth it.  The cost-of-goods for making a Nintendo Wii game is no different than that of making an XBox 360 title, so raising the retail price will inherently benefit the publisher more than the disc manufacturing companies.  The retail cut on Wii games is probably more than 5/6ths that of a X360 or PS3 game, because they take up the same amount of shelf space -- retailers get upset if the shelf space they use to stock your product is "worth less" than the shelf space used to stock competitor products, unless the sale rate is proportionately higher, on a per title basis (which it is, but only on 1st party titles, usually).  With a higher retail price, the retailers will be all the more pleased to stock Wii games.

Make making quality Wii games profitable for the 3rd party publishers.  Make Wii games cost $60.

Discuss. =)

EDIT: Someone with some time to mine data, tell us how many units it took for EA to make $137M revenue on the PS3 this past quarter, and how many units is took EA to make $137M revenue on the Wii this quarter.  Also, tell us how many products (i.e. dev budgets) those units were spread across.

I can live without 3rd parties if the games are cheaper.

3rd parties can price their products as they like to, just like retailers can aswell. The most expensive Wii game i remember seeing, was the Cars game with a pricetag of 72€.

They already have for some of the multi-platform music games.

I suspect that Nintendo's fees are based as a % of total price. So they will probably go up automatically.

I wonder how this would affect sales.

I think there's a good chance you're right, with regards to licensing.  Still the CoG, and I believe the retail cut, as a %, will likely drop, if the price were hiked.

Raising prices is an amateurish error. Higher prices mean that gamers can afford fewer games--buying 5 games at $60, instead of 6 games at $50; and it also pushes down the value:cost ratio, making it more likely that consumers would pass on games, not buy more, or buy them used, or buy them when the price goes down.

That's a good question.  Undoubtably it would hurt Wii SW and HW sales by some amount... but by how much?

If we look at it from the other perspective -- say all HD titles dropped to $50.   That would raise HD HW sales, and lower per-title (3rd party) software sales... curiously putting them in a position closer to the Wii's.  Although how much closer is a big mystery -- I don't think it would be a huge effect.

It's less tennable than th HD situation because HD consumers are used to that pricing. Wii gamers just aren't.

I expect this will eventually happen, but it will be in the next generation, not this one.

I doubt whether many will agree with you.

A possible solution would be for Nintendo to put a 'Seal of Quality' on games they deem fit. Of course that comes with its own set of problems.

I think you're pursuing this logic somewhat backwards. They need to think about making quality games first, before they think of how they should price them.