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| IcaroRibeiro said: For Pokemon Sword: Full production began in September 2017. Approximately 1,000 people from multiple companies were involved in the development, marketing, localization, and public relations. Around 200 Game Freak employees worked directly on the games, while about 100 Creatures Inc. employees worked on 3D modeling. An additional 100 worked on debugging and game testing For 400 full time employees across QA, developing and modeling for 18 months is already close to 30 million, even if they are on average paying as low as 50k USD yearly Don't know how they managed to keep mainline budgets around 20 million. My only theory is some of their development is outsourced, and they are hiring the cheapest labour they can possibly find |
Marketing budgets tend to be separate from game development budgets, from what I can tell. The 20 million number is just for game development it seems most people are assuming. Also "being involved in one capacity or another" is very different from spending a dedicated 3 FTE of capacity per employee (three year's worth of work.)
Ohmori explains
"Ohmori: Yes, it’s really just everyone who collaborated on the project including contractors, outsourced companies, our partners like The Pokémon Company, Pokémon Company International, Creatures, and all the other people that have been involved at any point in the development."
It's possible that some of this is falling under shared budgets or different budgets. Like I am sure there is some alignment between the game development and the merchandising parts of The Pokémon Company, especially when it comes to things like Pokémon designs, as an example.
Given how these projects work, my guess is that any individual full-time employee likely is using most of their capacity on this game for about two years (probably at something like a 80% dedicated to this : 20% to other projects) at any given time then they move on to the next project as their primary. When that takes place, depends on the specific role, but there is almost certainly pipelining of capacity, and shared resources between different titles as one game finishes up development and the other starts.
In the interview you shared, Masuda says this,
|
So overall, how much bigger would you say, roughly speaking, this project was compared to previous games? Masuda: It’s hard to give a really clear answer but I’d say maybe 1.5 times the number of people as a general estimate. |
Which I think is pretty fair for a transition from the 3DS -> Switch. That's roughly what we saw between 6th -> 7th Generation for home consoles, a 50% increase in staffing initially and then further increases as the generation progressed.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 14 October 2025
