It has emerged that Red Steel is likely to be the most expensive Wii launch game by a country mile, with the development budget for the well-received FPS running to an impressive 10 million Euros, about $12.7M or GBP £6.8 million. Which is quite a lot given most publishers are estimating overall dev costs for turning out a Wii game at less than half that amount.

The news comes via a French radio interview conducted with Ubisoft's Montreal development studio, which yielded little more than the rather impressive pricetag a major Wii game can command and that we can expect about 13 hours of end-to-end play in Red Steel's main single-player mode.

This will however come as very welcome news to Nintendo fans and everyone else eagerly awaiting the arrival of the low-priced and innovative machine later this year. There was a very real risk that the Wii would see a lot of cheaply-made (if very playable) gimmick software somewhat cynically churned out by publishers hoping to cash in on early adopters.