I was wondering, given the current state of the Metroid series, what kind of budget Nintendo is supposed to put behind this game. On one side Nintendo, seeing the recent decline in popularity for Metroid games (sales-wise), might want to put a small budget behind the game in order to prevent big losses if people simply don't buy the game; on the other hand, for the same reason, Nintendo might want to push the game a lot, so that either it gains popularity, becoming one of Nintendo's flagship IPs as it was always intended to be, or it bombs, proving that there's not an audience for the series for the time being and putting the IP in the freezer.
I think the latter option is the most likely, given the Switch, alongside all of Nintendo's IPs releasing on it, are selling record numbers, it'd be foolish to not test the waters with a new audience before calling it a day for such an important series.
That being said it's really hard to guess how much money would be put behind this kind of game: Nintendo is one of the most efficient developers in the market in terms of costs of development, but this is likely going to be a very un-Nintendo like game, with greater detail and attention to graphics. On top of that, we don't even have clear numbers for the budgets put behind other Nintendo titles, the only indicator for a big game in recent years, was the numbers shared by Miyamoto about BotW: Miyamoto stated that BotW was the title with the biggest budget in Nintendo's history AND that to break even it needed to sell 2M copies.
Now, we all know that there's countless factors that could've been considered or excluded in the 2M figure like the percentage of downloads on Nintendo consoles vs physical copes, the cost of packaging and shipping, the sale price of the game etc. so for the matter of time let's pretend the actual revenue Nintendo makes from each copy of a game is from 50% to 80% of the actual price. That puts BotW's budget between 60 and 96 milions of dollars. I think it's unrealistic to expect Nintendo to invest more money on Metroid Prime 4 than BotW, especially when closer to the higher end of the range, but, given Metroid's sales exceeded the 2M units in the past, it's possible Nintendo might want to risk a loss, especially now that their financials are positive again.
I've purposefully avoided talking about marketing costs because marketing was covered a large share of BotW's budget since it was the launch title for the Switch and I think the same should happen for Metroid Prime 4: if Nintendo is really pushing the game, especially now that their ads are on-point, it makes sense to advertise it strongly to find as many new buyers as possible.
These are my thoughts regarding Metroid Prime 4's budget, if you were in Nintendo how much would you invest in the future of the series ?
