Global Hardware 15 December 2018

[DonFerrari]

Shore said:

DonFerrari said:

I agree on BotW that is why I said BotW have a budget similar to other AAA games (not the highest ones, but those are the exception on AAA as well).

The 300 people that worked on it where on constant basis? (GT5 for example had 100 people routinely and 300 depending on the phase of development).

For the development to cost 60M excluding marketing then they would need more than 2M to break even.

I believe the core team of zelda was around 100 people as well with other people coming and going between development stages, however you have to take into account that nintendo is the developer, publisher and platform holder, this means that the only money they loss on every copy is the retailer share and manufacturing costs, also the source fot the 2m break even mark don't specify if it is just developing costs or if it includes marketing as well. So again just a guess as we have little data on the matter.

Yes 100 core plus 200 floating (not knowing how many) is quite possible considering the scale and they changing for Switch and all the delays.

Well if they are talking just break even then I would likely consider all costs unless they give more detail. And yes their take would be higher than a 3rd party that is why I considered 30 instead of 20.

But anyway it doesn't make that much of difference in the points we are discussing. It isn't a low-end AAA game (10M) nor is the high end (over 100M), and could very well be quite close to GoW. Still unless it is badly managed (I don't think Nintendo suffers from this problem) creating 4k assets, highly realistic materials and textures, highly precise 3D models (and them cutting down to fit processing power) should cost more than more solid color palete with less subtle aspects.

There is a good reason for Indies to not use realistic graphics, they are expensive to produce. And of course I'm not saying Nintendo level of graphics and polish is anywhere near the Indies. Nintendo have best in class cartoon graphics and is highly specialized in it, but as good as it is still pertain on the cheaper side to produce.