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Faelco on 08 February 2017
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KrspaceT said:
Faelco said:

Art and graphics are 2 totally different things...

Okami as an example still has an awesome art even today, but its graphics are really bad. 

Art-style and colors against polygons and textures, art VS computer science... It's a really common difference, what's the problem here?

In that regard it is true that Zelda is graphically lower than Witcher 3. Though art-styles can be used to compensate for polygon and texture lows. If not in appeal which is subjective, in cost. 

To use Witcher 3 as an example again, the number 81 million U.S dollars is commonly thrown out as how much it cost to make, which is surprisingly cheap for a AAA game. Perhaps the Polish just bloat less than others. Anyway according to a Forbes Article I found (and the site is not a Nintendo biased location), the game needs to sell about 2 million copies to break even. Even the lowest estimates here lean that way quite heavy. 

As a 1st party game, Nintendo gets about 39 dollars per game at minimum, with digital increasing that number. That rougly coorelates to about 7.8 million in production costs. One coulds scale it up with digital sales as the per game cost, but I have no idea how much that is expected of the purchased title. I'd break down Witcher, but Witcher has a pretty big PC playerbase as it is and I have no idea if Valve gets the Console Maker and Retailer bits of the pie or not, plus PC's fragmented and rapidly cheapening marketplaces.


Also graphics age. I won't argue that Ocarina and Twilight Princess are ugly. Realism ages a lot faster, meaning that Wild will look better in, say, 10 years than Witcher. 

 

Still at the moment it is true that Witcher is greater graphically than Zelda is. How far that goes is up to the individual though.

Graphics and budget aren't always correlated...

And I would be really surprised if Zelda's production costs were only 8M dollars. It was a 300 people development team IIRC, which is big, and the development was pretty long (5-6 years?), no way the game ends up being really cheap in production costs for a AAA game (First example of AAA production cost I found: old Uncharted games, before UC4, cost something like 20M dollars each).