That hardly proves HD investment is unprofitable though, does it? Even after profits made, companies are sinking money into lots of other things, paying execs 'above' the developers, spending on rnd on non-game related matters, market research, cancelled projects etc.

 The San Diego story that came out from Joystiq I think shows where alot of companies are sinking their moeny - mismanagement causes them to sinks a stupid amount of money into something and make it unprofitable. That's no the HD consoles fault, and it could happen on any games developement. It seems to happen less in the east, where I think the publishers have a better lid on their studios.

 It's foolish to assume going to the Wii will reap better profits for a company though, it depends entirely on circumstances. The western publishers are getting a pathetic amount out of the Wii userbase and it does need to step up, but at the same time non of them can afford to take risks in trying to sell on a market few have had success on. When I put myself in these companies shoes I think alot of them are in a really tight spot at the moment, and after most of them made their name in the Ps1 and Ps2 days they're not used to have two completely split markets.

 Also on the MW2 note, it has sold $1 billion at retail. As far as Activision are concerned, they make ~$30 per copy sold, so they're sitting at something like $600 million of that revenue once you factor in the extra money made from prestige editions etc. Mw2 will sell all year though, and the DLC will probably generate them an extra $100 million, plus whatever Microsoft paid for exclusivity...

Sorry, I missed that post.

2 things:

1) - How many of those are 3rd party? Because Nintendo's software must count for a lot of that.

2) - Compare that to the HD consoles and if it's ridiculously out of proportion, I'll admit that I was wrong and you win the argument.

1) Roughly the top 80 third party (those that hit 500K, easier to calculate) games out of ~1,450 third party Wii games make up 129.22 Million sales of the 170 million total sales of Wii third party games. So it is similarly top heavy.

2) I'm not sure I understand why, as I don't agree with your judgment of "support", but here goes (360 only because I don't want to spend too much time counting):

I'm not sure how many X360 third party games there are, but we'll go with 800. I know it's much less than Wii as a raw number. Out of 277Mill sales for third party 360 games, 217Mill are made by the top 152 games that reach 500K. If you reduce that to the top 80, it should be around 165Mill (rough calculation). Whatever way you look at it, you get a much higher proportion of games for 360 that have enough effort put into them to reach a benchmark like 500K.

I'm not calling your honesty into question here, but could you source that? I'm really curious, now.