Well as for the topic of Development costs, THQ’s CEO Brian Farrell had this to say about developing games on the Wii -
" Q: Are the Wii titles coming out at half the cost?
A: Yes, and sometimes even less than that. Where costs are occurring in this generation are in asset and content creation. And since the Wii is not high-definition, and it can still look good. You have to remember a lot of game systems aren’t yet hooked up to high-def TVs. Content creation is costing all the money. With the Wii, you can look great at
a third of the cost sometimes. The business model on the Wii works."
http://gonintendo.com/?p=20030 Thats the ' advantage' (if you could call it that) of not going HD on the Wii. So like i said having only one third the sales of DMC4 is not that bad. I had a feeling people here didn' t take Wikipedias stuff to seriously either.
I won' t comment on the development costs for DMC. I made the assumption that its move to multiplatform was to maximize profits to offset the higher development costs involved in making the game.
As for Install base i based it on two things -
1) In December 06 you said that microsoft has sold 10 million consoles as they had predicted by this time. Its obvious microsoft has sold more since then.
2) I believe sony released there sales of the ps3 in April 07, they estimated around 3-4 million sold they would have sold more by the time of DMC4s release.
all up a ballpark figure of 13-14 million (as high as 16 million possibly or more by the time of DMC release) between them isn' t too out of the question, and no i did not check those websites like nexgenwars etc, i know no one here takes them seriously (thats why no link was included).
As for Wii the total sales could be as low as 6.5 million (going of your post on Wii sales for the end of the Fiscal Year being at 5.8 million by end of April) to around 8 million. I' m not sure exactly were it stands now.
In any event DMC4' s potential user base is around twice the size of that of RE:UC.
I know the release of games for Wii has been very slow as of late. All i' ve been playing is my PC over the last month (been playing Starcraft on LAN), and have only SSBM on the horizon that has me excited. Believe me i know it sucks at the moment for Wii owners, this i cannot deny. But these things can change in time.
My ' defence' of Nintendo and the Wii is more of like a different perspective. You know like glass half empty, half full type arrangement. WHere some may see the lack of HD graphics, and focus on casual gamers as a negative, i try to put things in a positive light. I just offer an alternate way of looking at the situation.