The Legend of Skyward Sword or how one game took down a whole company

[gumby_trucker]

As much as I'm hyped for SS, you may have a point, maybe... I wish I knew exactly how many man-hours were put into this project so that I could break it down more easily, but if I had to go out on a limb and guess I'd say that three games the size of Wii Sports Resort could have been made in the same amount of man-hours.

This is based on the assumption that roughly 400 man-years were put into the game - 200 developers working on it during the final year, and an additional 200 man years accumulated by a smaller team working on it during the remaining time (it comes out to 50 developers for four years, which doesn't sound unreasonable to me).
The second assumption is that a game like Wii Sports Resort should take a 50 man team about two years to create, maybe slightly more if there is trouble during production (as in the case of WSR). That comes out to 100+ man-years per game, or ~350 man-years for all three. Allowing for an error margin in my estimates we get about the same numbers...

This is of course an over simplification since SS would for example require a much larger art-staff than those type of games, including musicians, character designers, texture artists, story and scenario writers etc, whereas three completely unique WSR style games would require a larger emphasis on programming new gameplay mechanics - combined they would have much more mechanics than a Zelda game.

From a financial point of view it really doesn't make that much sense to continue investing such enormous budgets in this game. At most, SS will sell 10 mil. units lifetime, which is similar to Smash Brothers Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy. IIRC, those games took about half the time to complete, though in the case of Smash Brothers the teams were much larger, spanning multiple companies, so the total man-hours were definitely not less than Zelda's. From that point of view Smash Bros. also makes very little sense, which begs the question: "Where do you draw the line?".

But this line of thinking is incomplete. One crucial thing to question about SS is the size of the main team throughout the majority of development. 200 people is a maximum that is only maintained during the final stages of production, when everything in the design is essentially approved and all that's left is to create the huge amount of assets the game demands. What I don't really know is how development and planning play out before that milestone.

For example, maybe the game was being created by a small core team of 20-30 developers during the majority of its production, similarly to how Pikmin 3 (another game that is taking ages to complete) has been said to have progressed. That would also explain the amount of time it has taken for SS to release. Even then the total amount of time invested in the game comes out to 300 man-years, which is still more than enough for 2 Wii Sports Resort type games...

However, if you take into consideration the fact that during SS supposedly five-year long production time, the Zelda team also created Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks and Link's Crossbow Training, then things start to look a bit differently. Both Crossbow Training and Phantom Hourglass were released in 2007, which makes it seem unlikely the Zelda team working on SS during that year was any more than a handful of people. This effectively reduces my estimate from 300 man-years (200*1 + 25*4) to 275 man-years (200*1 + 25*3).

Add to that the fact that Spirit Tracks was released in 2009, also by the same team. Since it's a smaller game let's assume the whole thing only took 75 man-years to produce: 275--> 200 man-years for SS.

Suddenly we've reached a number that starts to look a lot more reasonable IMO, especially when you consider that Zelda games usually have troubled developments and Miyamoto "upending the tea-table" frequently, resulting in increased man-hours for the game.

So my question to Rol: Do you REALLY think games like Super Mario Galaxy (1 or 2, for that matter) or Smash Bros. Brawl had considerably less than 200 man-years put into them? Remember that there is a whole studio in Tokyo dedicated to the Galaxy games, and that Brawl is a MASSIVE undertaking.

A Nintendo shareholder with no interest whatsoever in games would probably take about 2 Wii Sport Resort games over a Zelda or a 3D Mario or Smash any day of the week, but would anybody who loves games really make that trade? Furthermore, how many of those games can a company release during one generation before they stop being 20+ million sellers and people get tired of them? We probably could have had 1 or 2 more, but definitely not 8 more like the shareholder would think.

The same goes for 2D Mario games. We could have had one more, but it's not like there is such a HUGE gap between the ideal situation and what Nintendo have delivered. There is definitely room for improvement, though, and I hope the teams continue to improve in the way they are managed.

To summarize: thread title is needlessly sensational in order to attract viewers - IGN would be proud