Predict the lifetimes sales of Pokémon Legends Z-A

[Otter]

Zippy6 said:

Otter said:

Oh I'm speaking in Pokemon terms. 

One of my suspicions on why this game looks so basic is that they want to use it as an experiment for combat evolution and minimised effort elsewhere.  Meanwhile the team is dedicating their actual time the next-gen entry. This could literally have half the development cost of Arceus and internal expectation may reflect that. As I said, not all sequels or spinoffs are equal in terms of cost or subsequent expectations, so just something to bare in mind. 

As per the leaks, the development cost for Arceus was 2.18B Yen and their internal estimate for Z-A at the time of the leaked data (2024?) was 2B Yen. ($14.3m vs $13.2m). So if the final development cost was as they estimated it was cheaper to make but by less than 10%. It's also worth noting that Z-A at the time of the leak was internally expected to launch in 2024 so the budget could have easily exceeded their estimates and ended up costing more to make than Arceus.

But as I said before the dev budgets are so dramatically low they'll make a crap ton in profit even if it sells less than arceus. Even with a very large marketing budget they'd be breaking even by 3m sales.

I see, well point remaining about different expectations regarding different entries. Insomniac for example did not expect Ratchet Rift Apart to sell more than than the 2016 game. There's always a context to take into account. 

Edit: More precisely they expected it to sell notably less