Apparently, they have 70 animators doing episode for a week. Not sure what their salaries are, but I think episode costs around $1.3M (that is whole budget, not just animation). Not sure why it's that much, Star Wars: Clone Wars episode was $1M, SW:Rebels is $500K. Family Guy is $2M a pop, American Dad is $1M per episode (or other way around, can't recall). Lot of that money goes to actors, I suppose...

Yeah, South Park might not have high end AAA art budget, yet it is hand animated, and that still costs pretty penny - I'd wager much more than retro visuals of Octopath, given that  South Park (at least first one) is treated as lower cost AAA.

I think the whole problem with $60 is that it's accepted as sort of a ceiling (bar some fancy editions) - which in turn, at least in my view, should warrant a game that has both content and production values at highest level. Not just one...or the other. In the case of Octopath, from everything I heard, content value is quite high...but I don't think production value is up their with the best.

Let me give another example from fairly similar, yet different field - boardgames.
Content value would be how good the game is, how good mechanisms are and how well they click with a theme (if game is not abstract), how long the game is for what it offers, how replayable it is...and other similar things.
Production value would be amount of components, quality of art, quality of materials used for board, cards, tokens and inserts and such things.
So (and I'm speaking about hobby boardgames, what is often referred to as designer board-games, not mass-market ones) there is way more difference in prices - there's no artificial $60 cap like in video games - you can have games as low as $5 (for simple card games) all the way to $400 (Kingdom Death: Monster), probably even more.
It's not even uncommon that very same game is picked up by another publisher few years after initial release, made with higher quality components and art and than sold at higher price.

Video games, on the other hand, are stuck in the mass market - for example, Witcher 3 (game that I rate as 8/10) is high quality both in content and in production - yet it's $60 game, because of that cap that is there cause of mass market. If you take that $60 cap into account, you can understand why I think only highest quality content + production value deserves that price tag.

I can see why Octopath might be worth for many $60 - I'm guilty of similar thing with Combat Mission games (tactical simultaneous turn-based wargames) for last 17 years, games with high content value (for its genre), yet not that great production values - $60 per pop, sold only on their site - because they're worth that much to me - yet, not for a second, would I ever think that in this $60 capped video game economy, value of those games is actually that.

To me, personally, it's ridiculous to put a lot of money and effort to have a poor look intentionally, but I do know a lot do it =] I rather invest on pristine and pretty

To me, personally, it's ridiculous to put a lot of money and effort to have a poor look intentionally, but I do know a lot do it =] I rather invest on pristine and pretty

Honestly, I'm not sure why South Park costs as much as it does (meaning per episode). I can only speculate that due to animation team being in US, being fairly large (70) and having to do the job in a week (and often making changes day before airing an episode) they are well compensated. Do the same thing in India or South Korea, where I believe most of 2D stuff is done, and it will be fairly cheaper.

Octopath Traveler has a good look intentionally.

Perhaps they do to much hand draw animation instead of using more computer aided solutions.

We were talking about South Park show in that convo.