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| Kyuu said: But do we actually have any proof that the likes of Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade, and Metroid Prime 4 are "cheap"? These games take too long to make (maybe not Xenoblade. Monolith is quite productive). And we don't know how much Nintendo spends on marketing, do we? |
TOTK had a 6 years development cycle and over 1200 credits of professional work. It's totally an AAA game, no discussion
Mario Odyssey has 290 credits. It's 40% less of Astrobot's, although it's partially because things like localization, offices, global project management, bussines operation, etc. But both games look similar in scope, but of course PS5 has better graphics because it's developed for PS5 so they probably needed more workforce to work on those models and animations. Both were developed in around 3 years. I will classify both as AAA too, but on lower-end on the budget. Maybe sub-100 million (and of course well over 100 million for both with marketing costs, which was HUGE for Odyssey, even in Brazil where Switch was not even released in 2017 there was marketing for this game)
Xenoblade 3 has ~1k professional roles but ~130 were voice actors and ~370 musicians, singers, music producers, music production staff, etc (I asked chat GPT to count for me, so take my number with a grain of salty!). It's quite interesting how much effort and money they put on music, if you ask me it must have one of the most expensive music production among japanese games. It also features motion capture and tons of outsourcing for QA and Testing. It had a 4 years development cycle, I check all the items for AAA development in my book as well and maybe the most expensive JRPG outside Final Fantasy and maybe Dragon Quest XI?
Metroid Prime we need to see the credits list, but it gives me strong AAA vibes. They restarted development in 2019, so its a 6 years development cycle. Given the game size, graphics and duration I will not be surprised if it's the most expensive Nintendo game yet.
