Has anyone successfully made a Wii game, shipped it and sold it?
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Admittedly very few, but there are some at the bottom of this page: Made With Unity | Unity
āMax and the Magic Markerā is a good gameā¦ the others are aimed at children.
Lapland Studios released the āLead the Meerkatsā for Wii, using Unity. Donāt know if game is any good thou 
Not many games have been made because of the price for the Wii Standalone, etc.
Hahahaha, thatās a good one man. That has nothing to do with it. Even if they lowered the price to FREE, you arenāt going to have a bunch of 16 year olds making Wii games, because NINTENDO has to register you as a developer before you can even think of purchasing a license.
And they just donāt hand them out like candy. You need to be a real company, with a real office location.
I played Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart for the Wii. Iām pretty sure that these games were made by a disgruntled collective of farm animals who paid Nintendo off in order to have the games released to the public, for the purpose of cross-species mind genocide.
Not even that is enough.
Nowadays, if you arenāt backed up by a publisher you have nearly no chance. Various nintendo platform long time developers in the past got rejected by nintendo cause 3-5 people with nintendo (even gamecube) experience, enough money, business space and a good idea arenāt enough anymore for nintendo to approve you, even for WiiWare.
so, the $15k / $30k is really a 0.000000% problem, cause the vast majority will never even get a chance to get their hands on a dev license to consider buying unity wii (many of them though stand comparable little chance to get onto the xbox and ps3 either so nothing to worry about those unity pro addon licenses either)
Wow, sounds like a lot of work. I donāt think I will be putting any games on a console but, what would be the easiest console to get on? What about the Xbox 360ās indie section? Would it hard to get on there?
PSN would be easiest. You only need a PERFECT game with bugs below zero 
BLAh has retarded approval system, but otherwise about as easy
All assuming that unity ps3 will support psn minis and offer licenses for that at all (I doubt it cause I donāt think we will see ps3 licenses below the $20k / title range on top of unity3 pro which is the base requirement for any console licensing and in that range I have some serious doubts of its marketability for ps3 minis)
the normal psn dev license isnāt as trivial to get from what I heard, you have to get through the regular approval too, as its not like the āappstore on psā as the minis.
also it was once mentioned, assuming I remember right, that it is targets to use the dev kit and the ps3 standard graphics library stuff, not some funny hack or ogl mess, so potentially that confirms the dev kit requirement (ruling out minis at least unless you have a dev license etc)
and no, x360 indie section wonāt happen. Thats XNA (no native code at all, only managed one ā unity canāt run there at all) and UT clarified that the X360 support is XDK only so xbox live arcade and disk distribution, requiring dev license, dev kit etc.
PS3 dev kit and debug kit are different kind of things. The Debug Kit is the all mighty system that shoots lasers and turns Gods and Goddesses in to cockroaches while the PS3 dev kit allows you to run unlicensed games on PS3 while the debug kit allows you to access PS3 mainfunctions and fire nukes at microsoft.
Dev kit is relatively easy to get, in practice you only need a working product (something with you can convince sony that you can deliver a fine product), a well written GDD that clearly points at plans and requirements and time frame and what not, and of course damn nicely written application. The price of dev kit is approx $1000-2000. You donāt need license, Sony CONTROLS everything you even consider adding to PSN, same is with microsoft and XBLAā¦ and they both are very assy about products added there.
Nintendo is different thing. Theyāre completely nuts.
Also getting games to retail is very difficult, but downloadable not so much.
Edit: Of course i donāt mean getting game on PSN or BLA is similiar to walking to your local shop and buying bottle of milk, its more like climbing mount everest to buy bottle of milk, but easy compared to many other optionsā¦ like Nintendo :roll:
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More interesting edit: Ah, found finally!
http://us.playstation.com/support/answer/index.htm?a_id=785
Information on seeking licensing agreement. Nice sony executive knight also told me that while the āarticleā doesnāt point it out, you (as a new developer) should also deliver any possible game materials you have. Just donāt expect anyone at Sony to pick up your game if you only have 10 pages of text and title 
with the āstandard graphics libraryā I meant the XDK counterpart for sony ā¦ please donāt ask me how its called, but you should be able to find it on the original 3.0 / PS3 announcement thread, think ReJ posted about it when someone asked what library UT is going to target where he answered the ātrue oneā (sense wise)
A little off-topic, anyone try publish Unity games on Steam?
Why iTune only offer download iPhone/iPod apps only? Itād be cool if iTune also able to download OSX and Windows applicaiton/games.
If Apple do that I wonder the Steam client would ever exists.
There are at least two Unity made games on Steam, āMonster Trucks Nitroā and āMax and the Magic Markerā.
There are even more. Guns of icarus is one too for example and there are others
TBH I think the Wii is a moneysink to third-parties anyway. Nintendo wears the Wiiās market penetration like a badge of honor, but in the long run most of the people who buy the Wii just donāt buy a lot of games. And when they do buy them, they are first party Nintendo games.
The Wii is aimed at the casual audience, and for that demographic to hear about your game you need a very aggressive and expensive marketing campaign. For nintendo, thats no hurdle, for a third party and their publisher, its a brickwall. Not to mention most casual gamers have no idea that Wii-Ware even exists.
The Wii has the same problem as the iPhone App store, 90% of the revenue is made by 5% of the games. And most of the problem in both cases is the staggering amount of shovelware in the market.
Its the new gold rush, someone finds gold, which attracts a whole bunch of people. The prospect of finding gold keeps a lot of people digging, but the small amount of gold only benefits a select few.
And then there is Unity Technologies, who are rich from selling shovelsā¦
hahahahaha, and these days, it seems that its more profitable to sell shovels than the actual gold
hahahaa
since those distribution channels came out, devs had the crazy ideas of making tons of money with quick projects like if those channels were mines of endless of enrichment.
when in reality the gold is just an illusion fueled by greed and the mine resources have been depleted long time ago, by the first few lucky guys, and the rest just help producing shovelware at worringly high rates
hi ā¦ i was reading all post here.
I am an iphone, ipad and macstore developer ā¦
and my small question is ā¦:
how can I make wii games, to play only on my house with my family NOT FOR SALEā¦ ?
in other wordsā¦
can I use unity3d, to make a family game and burn the ISO for the wii and play ā¦ not for sale , just for fun !. can I ?
how ?
thanks for any help !
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Unity Wii is a per-title license that is $30,000 for a disk title and $15,000 for a WiiWare title. You also need to be a registered Nintendo developer to get the license (note: enrollment has its own set of restrictions and rules). Itās possible, but not plausible for your average Joe.