Twitter user: "No Bayonetta on PS4?" Hideki Kamiya: "Ask Ninty, also ask for Mario and Zelda on PS4"

[DonFerrari]

SpokenTruth said:

DonFerrari said:

Yep, having UC1 and 2 really helped driving 3 cost down... but from what I found from 1 to 4 the cost wasn't that much different (talking about 30-50M range, that is average AAA games).

I think Zelda have costed around 30M, hard to be more than that because of the style used (it is a good and pretty game, but doesn't seem like a money hungry one)

The bulk of development costs is simply salary.  Differences in technology, art styles, voice, etc....are small fractions by comparison and can be misleading when speculating on dev costs.

BotW had a full time staff of 100 working on it for 5 years.  Using the formula, that suggests a dev cost of ~$35 million.  They had a part time crew of 200 more throughout development which probably bumps it closer to $45 million.

It can also vary wildly simply by location of the studio.  Average salary in the US is $85,000, $50,000 in the UK and just under $20,000 in Poland.  That's why Witcher III had a production cost of just $12.2 million.

Sure salary is the most relevant cost to calculate. But art style, size of game and VA add on team size and additional cost.

100-300 (fixed and contracted to specific portions) for 5 years were more or less the involvement for GT5 at the time. Zelda although with simpler look have a lot of attention to detail that can drive dev time to higher portions.

But about the 100 for Zelda, do you have a source that the 100 were involved around the whole project the whole time? (because a lot of steps on the game are specific to one team while other artists don't participate).