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 ? 

I think they'll invest probably around the 40 million mark for the game's budget, maybe even lower. 

60 Million

Less than 10 million.

11 billion and sacrifice a goat

Your numbers are way too high, I think. 20m or less.

Its nintendo, under 20m and it will be off better quality than any big AAA publisher has offered. I honestly think marketing is where those big publishers spend most of their budget. Nintendo wont d anything stupid regarding marketing.

20 million or less would be my guess.

Nintendo tends to run tight budgets. Going off of Nintendos comments about BoTW, it probably had a budget of around 60 million (wich might include marketing) and that was their biggest, most expensive game ever. Plus Zeldas tend to have long dev cycles by Nintendo standarts.

30 million or less.

I'd invest top tier BotW money and here's why: the demand for the game is huge, that's obvious by the reactions across the gaming community when it was announced last E3. Moreover, it has the potential for hype to go through the roof if Nintendo treats it like their highest tier games and really knocks it out of the park. It has a hugely popular platform to launch on with an install base that will likely be approaching 50m when it releases (assuming it's at least a year away). None of the Prime games have ever really had this since the GCN install base was never very big, and Wii was still in its infancy and only 9 months old when MP3 came out.  Now I know the counter argument is going to be that Metroid has never been a huge seller so why would this?

The answer lies in games like Skyrim, BotW, and most recently God of War. All of those games absolutely destroyed the previous sales ceilings in their franchises because the respective studios went all out for them and delivered products that blew people away. This made the hype and word of mouth explode for them. 

The same thing can happen for MP4 if Nintendo plays this right. Again, the insane reactions over the reveal prove the potential for massive hype is there for the game. But they have to be willing to treat it like it's a Super Mario game or something, much like Sony treated the new God of War as if it were a GTA level of popularity game. And it paid off huge, the game could come close to tripling the lifetime sales of the previous best seller in the franchise. I can see a similar situation for MP4 where it does around 3x MP1's franchise high for 7-9m lt if they invest in and treat it as a top tier exclusive. Also, they should steal a page from God of War's playbook and drop the 4, that could hinder its ability to appeal to as wide of a new audience. Just give it a subtitle.