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StarTopic Nintendo First Party Software Development |ST| Nintendo Party Superstars

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Nemesis24 said:
also.. man its so weird how people attribute so much of zelda and other games to monolith while they ignore SRD, NERD and the other support studios working on those games. I love monolith but it weirds me out seeing this kind of thing happening
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I'd argue it's a bit different with Zelda because they had a major role in game design, art, and programming. The Splatoon 3 praise was dumb in comparison because they had less than 20 people on it.
 
LukasManak22 said:
BOTW budget can't be estimated, it's the complete miss information that's spread around for multiple years. Here's the Reddit post explaining it. Miyamoto was saying something about 2 million sales figure but it was not even related to BOTW. I would say it's actually impossible to have any real estimate of budget for any EPD project.

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120 million isn't that far fetched though.

We do know that the main development team was around 300 members, and development in full started around 2013. That's 4 years of development on an average 80k a year salary. That is about $96,000,000. Add in VA work, localization, outsourcing, Havok Engine, and you are probably around the ballpark of 120 million for actual development costs.

Marketing is probably impossible to estimate though, since BotW's main marketing campaign was tied so closely to the Switch. They had the same marketing teams as well, to handle both launches simultaneously.
 
LukasManak22 said:
BOTW budget can't be estimated, it's the complete miss information that's spread around for multiple years. Here's the Reddit post explaining it. Miyamoto was saying something about 2 million sales figure but it was not even related to BOTW. I would say it's actually impossible to have any real estimate of budget for any EPD project.

Click to expand...

looked at this link and it's a reddit post quoting purple site. lel

from the context 2 million sounds like it was an average/typical sales target, Zelda is absolutely budgeted to do better than that
 
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Lozjam said:
120 million isn't that far fetched though.

We do know that the main development team was around 300 members, and development in full started around 2013. That's 4 years of development on an average 80k a year salary. That is about $96,000,000. Add in VA work, localization, outsourcing, Havok Engine, and you are probably around the ballpark of 120 million for actual development costs.

Marketing is probably impossible to estimate though, since BotW's main marketing campaign was tied so closely to the Switch. They had the same marketing teams as well, to handle both launches simultaneously.
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You are assuming that all of them worked on the game for the same time, which they did not.
 
invwar said:
BOTW has over 800 people in the credits, TOTK 1000. Assuming that 200-300 people in average worked throughout the development process all the time is imo not that far fetched.
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It's only not far fetched because you think it looks right. We have no historical data to pull tends from nor even an average salary to divine a number from (as bad of a measure that is too).

Just throwing out random numbers isn't good discussion here
 
MetalLord said:
www.mobygames.com

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom credits (Nintendo Switch, 2023) - MobyGames

The official game credits for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released on Nintendo Switch in 2023. The credits include 1,408 people.
www.mobygames.com www.mobygames.com
finally on mobygames, it went from 974 to 1408
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1.408 people worked on Tears of the Kingdom? that a lot of developer just working on a single game, 1.148 WOW, that the largest amount of devolopers just worked on a single game
 
Giancarlo said:
1.408 people worked on Tears of the Kingdom? that a lot of developer just working on a single game, 1.148 WOW, that the largest amount of devolopers just worked on a single game
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Its 800 people involved active in the development, the other 600 are Thanks, voice artists and localisation manager, who was only for a very short time involved.
 
invwar said:
Its 800 people involved active in the development, the other 600 are Thanks, voice artists and localisation manager, who was only for a very short time involved.
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i see, still a lot of developers involved to bring this masterpiece to us, by comparsion, how many people worked on Breath of the Wild? it was the same amount as the Tears of the Kingdom? or Nintendo increased it workflow/face, due to the game be more ambitous to Breath of the Wild.
 
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Retro shows no sign of stopping their hiring spree. Between contractors and full workers they have already hired inbetween 16 to 19 new employees. If they keep this up they will easily surpass 30 employees in a single year.
 
Mr Doggo said:
Retro shows no sign of stopping their hiring spree. Between contractors and full workers they have already hired inbetween 16 to 19 new employees. If they keep this up they will easily surpass 30 employees in a single year.
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that nice, i want Retro Studios to florish like Monolith Soft florish around the Wii/Switch era.
 
N75 said:
I'd argue it's a bit different with Zelda because they had a major role in game design, art, and programming. The Splatoon 3 praise was dumb in comparison because they had less than 20 people on it.
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Yeah I looked over and saw they hav over 100 employees on totk. I guess this was Tokyo branch working on the game again, while Splatoon/Pikmin/AC are all kyoto branch doing art and graphics
 
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I love that this is the headline that's going around anywhere when Aonuma doesn't actually say that explicitly in the piece and it's just Gene Park's tweet that phrases it that way.
 
TheMoon said:
I love that this is the headline that's going around anywhere when Aonuma doesn't actually say that explicitly in the piece and it's just Gene Park's tweet that phrases it that way.
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Reminds me of famous "Aonuma said that BOTW2 will be darker than Majora's Mask" when he never said that.
 
like, this is what's actually in the article:

“Breath” became most successful title in the series, with about 30 million copies sold, creating especially high expectations for “Tears.” It was supposed to be out by last year, but in March 2022, Aonuma had to announce its delay, “to make sure that everything in the game was 100 percent to our standards,” he said. Big video games these days have been launching with bugs and poor graphical performance, while “Tears” was released with no issues, despite more complex physics than even the most expensive PlayStation 5 title.
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the thing that's making headlines comes from the article's writer's tweet and is presented as new information:

aonumac9fmn.jpg

did he actually say that? is that Park reading into things?
 
TheMoon said:
like, this is what's actually in the article:



the thing that's making headlines comes from the article's writer's tweet and is presented as new information:

aonumac9fmn.jpg

did he actually say that? is that Park reading into things?
Click to expand...

I feel like if he actually said that it would make it's way into the article right?

It's kinda the same for "Nintendo was worried TOTK marketing was not resonating with fans, which prompted them to fast track a gameplay demonstration to clarify its mechanics" thread that was there recently.

This was in the article:

"Another hiccup came when the second trailer dropped in February, and the team noticed a lack of enthusiasm. “People had not gotten their heads around the gameplay elements or where the fun might be,” Aonuma said. Nintendo decided to feature Aonuma explaining the game’s concepts in a 13-minute demonstration, which did the trick."

The last part about Nintendo decided to do a gameplay video is from Washington Post, not something Aonuma said. It does not explicitly mean that they had to do gameplay video because of fans response, it was still February and they knew they have not shown everything in detail, including Fuse for the first time. Aonuma just says that lack of enthusiasm for trailer #2 was because they have not detailed it yet.
 
So, I saw that Monolith had a lot of employees working on TOTK, around 106 from what I could count. In Botw I looked at the credits again but couldn't find how many Tokyo staff worked on it, so anyone has any idea?
 
Nemesis24 said:
So, I saw that Monolith had a lot of employees working on TOTK, around 106 from what I could count. In Botw I looked at the credits again but couldn't find how many Tokyo staff worked on it, so anyone has any idea?
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I don't think they're separated from the Kyoto studio, but the Tokyo studio has a dedicated Zelda team, so the bulk of the staff came from there
 
Nemesis24 said:
yeah ik tokyo and kyoto are separated, i was more asking if botw also had around 100 or so monolith staff because i saw that number for totk
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just reminded me of this little snafu which is funny in retrospect when you look at the actual number of people in the credits outside of core dev^^

www.gameinformer.com

Monolith Is Helping Work On The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

Update: Nintendo has clarified how it is working with Monolith on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
www.gameinformer.com www.gameinformer.com
 
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Apopheniac said:
They had around 50 people working on BotW out of Tokyo. The company has grown a lot since then.

www.siliconera.com

Monolith Soft Boss Talks To Katsura Hashino About Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Development Struggles

www.siliconera.com www.siliconera.com
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Monolith Soft has two studios, one in Kyoko that develop it main projects and the other in Tokyo that a suport studio for many of Nintendo games, like Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Splatoon 2 e 3, and so on, last time they updated they updated it employees count was around 272 in 2021, now must be closer to 300 employees.
 
Giancarlo said:
Monolith Soft has two studios, one in Kyoko that develop it main projects and the other in Tokyo that a suport studio for many of Nintendo games, like Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Splatoon 2 e 3, and so on, last time they updated they updated it employees count was around 272 in 2021, now must be closer to 300 employees.
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The Tokyo studio is their main studio that does Zelda and Xenoblade. The Kyoto studio is the support group.
 
LukasManak22 said:
I feel like if he actually said that it would make it's way into the article right?

It's kinda the same for "Nintendo was worried TOTK marketing was not resonating with fans, which prompted them to fast track a gameplay demonstration to clarify its mechanics" thread that was there recently.

This was in the article:

"Another hiccup came when the second trailer dropped in February, and the team noticed a lack of enthusiasm. “People had not gotten their heads around the gameplay elements or where the fun might be,” Aonuma said. Nintendo decided to feature Aonuma explaining the game’s concepts in a 13-minute demonstration, which did the trick."

The last part about Nintendo decided to do a gameplay video is from Washington Post, not something Aonuma said. It does not explicitly mean that they had to do gameplay video because of fans response, it was still February and they knew they have not shown everything in detail, including Fuse for the first time. Aonuma just says that lack of enthusiasm for trailer #2 was because they have not detailed it yet.
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It's really easy to infer that second statement at least. Admitting there was a lack of enthusiasm after trailer #2 is more than enough of an indictment against their marketing strategy by itself.

This type of editorializing is definitely annoying though, I agree. Even still at least, Aonuma's first statement implies the intention behind the 2022 delay for largely for polishing, even if it wasn't solely it. Given that, it's easy to see how TOTK took over 6 years to develop:
  • 2017 - Conceptual development/wrapping up BOTW's DLC
  • 2018 - Conceptual/experimentation, main development by starting around H2 2018.
  • 2019 - Main development.
  • 2020 - Lost year. Nintendo was inefficient and remote work was severely disruptively.
  • 2021 - Main development.
  • 2022 - End of main development, largely polish according to Aonuma.
So TOTK was practically only in main development for 3.5~ years, which is much more aligned with the sequel we got. Let's hope they deploy a more efficient development structure for the next game, and that we don't get another pandemic.
 
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Good-Feel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
So what do you think Good-Feel is working on? Do they have something cooking for the Switch? Is the Samurai Action game ever coming out? Did they spent all of their time, effort and resources into Monkey Barrels since 2019??? So many questions...
 
Dutchie said:

Good-Feel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
So what do you think Good-Feel is working on? Do they have something cooking for the Switch? Is the Samurai Action game ever coming out? Did they spent all of their time, effort and resources into Monkey Barrels since 2019??? So many questions...
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My guess that samurai "goemon" game actually became a Ganbare Goemon game.
 
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Dutchie said:

Good-Feel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
So what do you think Good-Feel is working on? Do they have something cooking for the Switch? Is the Samurai Action game ever coming out? Did they spent all of their time, effort and resources into Monkey Barrels since 2019??? So many questions...
Click to expand...
They may have a switch port of kirby's epic yarn or Yoshi's Woolly World ready for release in 2024.
 
Dutchie said:

Good-Feel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
So what do you think Good-Feel is working on? Do they have something cooking for the Switch? Is the Samurai Action game ever coming out? Did they spent all of their time, effort and resources into Monkey Barrels since 2019??? So many questions…
Click to expand...
I’m starting to get worried about them tbh it’s been so long since their last major game
 
Andre3333456 said:
They may have a switch port of kirby's epic yarn or Yoshi's Woolly World ready for release in 2024.
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With Zelda remasters and xenoblade chronicle x, Yoshi WW is one of the last Wii u ports I really want. I think it’s better than the Yoshi released on switch. I like Kirby but we’ve had a lot of games lately for this license.

However any 2D plateformer port in 2024 would imply we won't get a 2D Mario or am 2D DK soon.
 
boodream said:
With Zelda remasters and xenoblade chronicle x, Yoshi WW is one of the last Wii u ports I really want. I think it’s better than the Yoshi released on switch. I like Kirby but we’ve had a lot of games lately for this license.

However any 2D plateformer port in 2024 would imply we won't get a 2D Mario or am 2D DK soon.
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NSMUDX and SMM2 were just 5 months from each other. In fact Yoshi Crafted World released in March before SMM2 too.
 
LukasManak22 said:
NSMUDX and SMM2 were just 5 months from each other. In fact Yoshi Crafted World released in March before SMM2 too.
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Assuming these two games exist, I already expect that the release dates of the next Mario and the next DK will be fairly close. Of course they can still release other 2D platform games in the next few months but it could be a lot.

I’m not worried, there will certainly be other periods of drought in the future. Ports will always be welcome sooner or later.

Not to mention that the two new Mario and DK are still only rumours, even if I personally want to believe it.
 
boodream said:
Assuming these two games exist, I already expect that the release dates of the next Mario and the next DK will be fairly close. Of course they can still release other 2D platform games in the next few months but it could be a lot.

I’m not worried, there will certainly be other periods of drought in the future. Ports will always be welcome sooner or later.

Not to mention that the two new Mario and DK are still only rumours, even if I personally want to believe it.
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I think 2D DK game will release in H1 2024.

While both are still rumors it's not far fetched to expect a Mario game from EPD10, especially since they were hiring for it ever since 2019.
 
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Andre3333456 said:
They may have a switch port of kirby's epic yarn or Yoshi's Woolly World ready for release in 2024.
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those two already got ported (to 3DS). It's extremely unlikely that they'll just port them yet again.

usually what seems like a most obvious 1+1=2 thing with Nintendo devs/releases is about as far away from what's gonna happen as it gets
 
This is the funniest way to see them leak early, but someone with access to the blu ray special features posted the concept art shown in one of the behind the scenes clips in 3DS camera quality. Some Illumination artist work but a lot of internal EPD art (Nakaue and co) which show a few ideas that didn't make it into the final.





Luigi, Toad and Yoshi joining Mario and DK in the wedding crash, Squawks being cut from the Jungle Kingdom segment (this is the first time we've seen Squawks in this art style), a classic bridge over lava confrontation, and a few smaller details. Can't wait to see these in full quality.

Cross-posting between the Mario Movie thread and here since I feel this is a pretty interesting peek into how involved EPD were in the production of the movie.
 
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MondoMega said:
This is the funniest way to see them leak early, but someone with access to the blu ray special features posted the concept art shown in one of the behind the scenes clips in 3DS camera quality. Some Illumination artist work but a lot of internal EPD art (Nakaue and co) which show a few ideas that didn't make it into the final.





Luigi, Toad and Yoshi joining Mario and DK in the wedding crash, Squawks being cut from the Jungle Kingdom segment (this is the first time we've seen Squawks in this art style), a classic bridge over lava confrontation, and a few smaller details. Can't wait to see these in full quality.

Cross-posting between the Mario Movie thread and here since I feel this is a pretty interesting peek into how involved EPD were in the production of the movie.
Click to expand...

Found some in full quality here. Bunch of art in the same style can be found in the 2020 Nintendo Company book too.

 
Djehuty said:
I still think a rhythm heaven will probabaly happen in second half 2023 or 2024.

While there’s isn’t much evidence of its existence due to its probably tiny dev team budget and time in dev due to size it proabably wouldn’t need much new people hired for it.
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late but YES PLEASE

I've been hoping for a new game for years now, it's time
 
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