Zelda U is highly unlikely to release next year

[kekrot]

TheLastStarFighter said:

DerNebel said:

TheLastStarFighter said:

I'm pretty sure EAD has much more than 350 employees and the Zelda team is probably well over 100 people.  Not that it matters, small teams make incredible games in a short time very often.

FYI, WWHD was made by 4 guys in 6 months, with a little outsourced help.

Well it does bother me abit that that 350 people number is unsourced, so if you'll find another source saying something else than I'll gladly retract my statement regarding the number of people working on Zelda (I'll still stick with 2015 though)

No one can say for sure.  But your Wiki source is simply >350 which does not mean there are around 350 by any stretch.

To give a ballpark, Nintendo employs directly over 5000 people.  It's safe to say that most work in production, but if we say only half do that's 2500 employees.  If we were to divide into around 10 divisions (6 in EAD, 2 in Tokyo and a few others) that's around 250 per division.  If that is all the Zelda EAD group had, they could have 125 working on handheld and another 125 on Zelda U... and that's being very conservative.

To put more perspective on things, Retro has over 100 employees and they have been referred to as a small studio in the past that is just now big enough to handle two games at a time.  Monolith also employs over 100.  It's safe to say Nintendo could allocate 100-200 people to the Zelda projects.

Aonuma has repeatedly said that the Zelda team is very flexible when it comes to working on either console or handheld. In the last year of a handheld Zelda development cycle, more people gets allocated to that. They go back and forth.