Aufhebung RPG
History is tragedy becoming comedy
I don't mean the next 3d zelda, I mean the next 3d mario is open world rumor source is zippo
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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)
- Thread starter Dakhil
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I would say its a fairly safe bet to, but could go both ways.
Lancelot
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It means absolutely everything, games used to be released between years, now they're released between seven years each. That's a huge workforce (including motion capture and support studios) working on a single thing for a very long time... What other explanation do you need?
Aufhebung RPG
History is tragedy becoming comedy
I don't think that's the case, open worlds are a trap as well as a money-gobbling behemoth, and if EPD had maintained the barest minimum of sanity then it would have been impossible for two open world projects to exist at the same time.
Depends on the open world, I don't think a Mario one would have to be. They could take the Bowsers Fury template to the next level.
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I already explained myself re: mocap and cutscenes with respect to Zelda. Unless we’re out here saying Xenoblade 2 was a 100 million dollar project, that’s not why Zelda costs what it does. Zelda is nowhere near the level of visual detail that most of the industry is chasing today, yet it still took years to release. Hell, Tears is mostly reusing existing assets from the previous game.
If the ballooning industry costs are really all mocap, UHD assets, etc. then my take is that Nintendo can and will continue to remove themselves from those requirements. The success of the next Zelda will not be determined by increasing budgets in those spaces.
Edit: I’m mostly just repeating myself.
ziggyrivers
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I don't get where this worry of Nintendo falling into the Sony/Xbox graphics race trap is coming from. We've gleaned from interview that their philosophy of taking advantage of better tech is to develop new ways to play. There is nothing indicative of them developing next gen hardware into a presentation tool of graphics, rather, they use it as a means to an end, and that end is innovative ways to present their IPs.
Lancelot
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It's not just fidelity is the thing. It isn't just mocap and expensive assets, these games got huge teams and Zelda is no exception, you're asking for the reason of development costs and that is why. Put a huge team to work at something for several years straight (regardless of how much is new or reused) and this will be the result, all that effort doesn't generally go unpaid. Nintendo teams (especially Zelda's) aren't going to get any smaller, they aren't immune to the leading cause even if they actively avoid iteration, it's as simple as that.
It isn't just those things, but they contribute hugely. A game with less focus on those things is cheaper to make than those who do.
Lancelot
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Have you seen how many people made that game with "less focus" on said things and for how long, I wonder? Compare the headcounts to AAA (plus support studios) and the rest is self explanatory.
hard to find budget for Nintendo games, which is the best examples I can think of.
You could argue there might have been more spec leaks without the Nvidia leak. Cause there's less incentive to just leak what we already know.
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Huge teams don’t just get thrown at a project without doing work on the project. You cannot just say the costs are rising because they have a huge team - they have a huge team because of something they are trying to accomplish that demands those resources.
If they aren’t doing motion capture, and they aren’t making new tons of new high fidelity assets, then the money spent is going elsewhere. I’m proposing it was development and testing of new systems (eg. Ultrahand) and that is once again removed from “broader industry ballooning costs.”
And frankly, just because a game took 6-7 years to make does not necessarily mean that all those resources were put on that project full time. Tinfoil hat time but there exists a possibility that while it took a very long time to polish this game off, it wasn’t all-hands for quite some time. Not every problem (optimization) can be solved by throwing more resources at it.
This is not tinfoil hat. I very much doubt it took a huge team working full time to get all that stuff working.
Giancarlo
Nintendo connoiseur
Nintendo usualy protype the game main mechanics, before transistioning to full develop, they dont immediately have a full development when they development it franchises, 1/2 months/years of pre-production and then 4/6 years of full development, this is how Nintendo handle the development of it games/franchises for a long time, and they will apply that to all Switch sucessor and future Nintendo consoles, even if they the possibility of making games with the twice of assets Nintendo use now for Switch.
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It doesn’t feel tinfoil hat, but it does breed unhealthy expectation that the team might have a new Zelda game much sooner. It’s something I don’t want to humour too much because damn does it sound good.
Aufhebung RPG
History is tragedy becoming comedy
The actual development cycle for Tears was five years, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi has revealed in interviews that the project was set up in January 2018 after doing botw's dlc, so you can project that the development cycle for the next installment will extend to over six years.
Lancelot
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This is meaning headcount, how many people made the game. BOTW has 914 people credited and TOTK had 1148, which is quite an increase by itself.
They still have to get paid, regardless of what are they're doing or in what stage they are currently. They did do motion capture for BOTW and TOTK, you can see the roles in the credits, but all the staff was still left staggered with a game that took 6 years to produce. Time is money, all this time they kept paying the employees is counted into the project and makes up the majority of a game's budget, it doesn't matter how productive or unproductive the team actually was... Why would that matter? The employees were still getting paid to make said game, if that was the case all the money "spent" would translate into the game which is never literally the case. It doesn't work that way, why do you think projects even get canned at early stages?
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boodream
Paratroopa
Not if you compare the respective launch prices of the consoles, as you know.
And indeed, quite apart from comparisons with the competition, there are other reasons not to go overboard on prices, not least the decline in people's purchasing power in general, and in Japan in particular, which as everyone knows is an important market for Nintendo.
400 is a price that is often speculated on, because it resembles a balance between inflation, rising costs and difficult economic conditions for consumers.
Giancarlo
Nintendo connoiseur
i believe that Nintendo has begun the pre-production of the next Legend of Zelda this year, and around 2025 the game will enter full production for a 2028/2029 release(unless a major event happen and negatively impact the game development)
You misunderstand. Im not saying they could have done it faster. Im saying certain tasks, a small team can do more efficiently than a big team. Like tuning the ultra hand mechanic/ physics engine.
Like it would take a small team say 4 years, but you can't just throw more people at it to make it go faster.
BingBong43
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Quick! Someone bring up joycons again!
Nobody says all those people were working during the entire development cycle.
Lancelot
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Only around 450 people working on it full time are enough to get to the budget people think it had, it's only to state the extent of the efforts put.
Aufhebung RPG
History is tragedy becoming comedy
2028 is not likely to be released, 2029 is a conservative estimate, based on several interviews I can tell that as of September they are still thinking about the new gameplay itself, and the approximate time of the project would have been around November last year, as Eiji Aonuma revealed in a December interview that there will not be a BOTW-TOTK sequel but a brand new Zelda, thenA six+ year cycle would lead to a possible release only in late 2029 at the earliest, and I think that's a conservative estimate
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I get you. I wasn’t clear enough in my post - if I assume that most of the latter development time was resourced by only a small portion of the staff focused on optimizing, that means the remainder of them would have absolutely been allocated to another new or different project.
From there I let myself believe that a new Zelda isn’t coming 6 years from the release of Tears, but rather sometime much sooner. It’s too hopeful, and flawed thinking - they could just as easily hit the same complex, long testing cycle style of development challenges again on the new title. In fact we should expect it. That’s just the type of game this team makes now: complex, dynamic, multiplicative gameplay.
Nintendo employees are not tied to a team, they constantly get shuffled around between projects as needed.
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Fair. I kind of assumed there was a “Zelda” team. I’m sure there’s a first party thread around here that discusses all this :]
Or go back and read some old Iwata Ask interviews.
Tentacle-tropes
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There are an array of reasons why games have gotten more expensive. There are no singular reasons for why it has gotten so expensive. It will be dependent on project for the most part
oldpuck
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Nintendo's development strategy for Zelda is almost guaranteed to make it unusually cheap relative to other games, at least on a per-year basis.
The primary driver of cost is man-hours, for obvious reasons, but also team size, and crunch. Larger teams are more expensive per man hour because of increased management costs (HR, facilities, IT support). Tight deadlines require teams to staff up using contactors at a higher rate per hour, driving up the cost, by using a large team to overcome tight deadlines.
"It will be done when it's done" puts the deadline problem off to the last minute, and the Zelda team specifically prefers to delay, rather than grow the team, or push man hours per dev. This is pretty explicitly a consequence of Aonuma's personal experience of crunch on Ocarina and Majora's Mask.
Nintendo's overall strategy of keeping games in the conceptual phase for long periods of time, and only staffing up after what is essentially a "second green light" - and shifting internal hires around rather than boom-bust hiring - also helps reign in cost even as development times grow.
When we talk about higher fidelity games, the driver of cost is two-fold. Yes, it takes longer to make more complex assets, especially geometry and animation. But it also takes technological investment to retool pipelines around higher fidelity assets. More storage, more advanced PCs, updated tools, new training, engine support. Nintendo gets an inaccurate reputation for not "pushing the hardware" or relying on legacy tech, but that's not really true. They push the hardware as hard as their rivals, in order to make their games compete despite the lower spec hardware, and their engines tend to be in in line with what their mainstream partners are adopting.
But they are rarely first to new rendering technologies or fidelity. They benefit from the maturity of third party tools, established research, and again, that they're not racing to be the first engine with ray tracing. That pulls back some of the cost that it often reputed to come with technological leaps.
The games that are unusually expensive on a per-year basis are (weirdly, probably) things like Pokemon, or even Kirby, where fairly relentless release calendars drive some insane contracting and development choices. Which isn't that this games are in absolute terms more expensive, or even less profitable, considering return-per-dollar, just that the value-per-dollar in terms of what you see in the final game is likely lower.
The primary driver of cost is man-hours, for obvious reasons, but also team size, and crunch. Larger teams are more expensive per man hour because of increased management costs (HR, facilities, IT support). Tight deadlines require teams to staff up using contactors at a higher rate per hour, driving up the cost, by using a large team to overcome tight deadlines.
"It will be done when it's done" puts the deadline problem off to the last minute, and the Zelda team specifically prefers to delay, rather than grow the team, or push man hours per dev. This is pretty explicitly a consequence of Aonuma's personal experience of crunch on Ocarina and Majora's Mask.
Nintendo's overall strategy of keeping games in the conceptual phase for long periods of time, and only staffing up after what is essentially a "second green light" - and shifting internal hires around rather than boom-bust hiring - also helps reign in cost even as development times grow.
When we talk about higher fidelity games, the driver of cost is two-fold. Yes, it takes longer to make more complex assets, especially geometry and animation. But it also takes technological investment to retool pipelines around higher fidelity assets. More storage, more advanced PCs, updated tools, new training, engine support. Nintendo gets an inaccurate reputation for not "pushing the hardware" or relying on legacy tech, but that's not really true. They push the hardware as hard as their rivals, in order to make their games compete despite the lower spec hardware, and their engines tend to be in in line with what their mainstream partners are adopting.
But they are rarely first to new rendering technologies or fidelity. They benefit from the maturity of third party tools, established research, and again, that they're not racing to be the first engine with ray tracing. That pulls back some of the cost that it often reputed to come with technological leaps.
The games that are unusually expensive on a per-year basis are (weirdly, probably) things like Pokemon, or even Kirby, where fairly relentless release calendars drive some insane contracting and development choices. Which isn't that this games are in absolute terms more expensive, or even less profitable, considering return-per-dollar, just that the value-per-dollar in terms of what you see in the final game is likely lower.
oldpuck
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It's both. As best as outsiders can glean, Nintendo has a number of groups - programmers, artists, sound engineers and composers - that are on paper underneath a lead. These are separate from the EPD "studios" who staff producers, directors, game designers. Those EPD teams are permanently staffed, but they "staff up" in various departments from the programming/artist/sound groups, for the length of the project.
Credits suggest that developers do tend to stick to the same EPD groups anyway, with the sound staff floating around the most
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I did read a few of them. I remember notably how Link Between Worlds was a project that a smaller team worked on while Skyward Sword was in development.
I think it was the way they talked about the team shifting between Zelda titles that made me assume they were more of a unit:
Source: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/a-link-between-worlds/0/0/
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ziggyrivers
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Consumers won't make the thought excercise of:
- The Switch costs just as much as the PS4 did when it launched.
This is even assuming that the general consumer does that console comparison exercise. With how Nintendo unique is in the sense that you get Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games, I don't think that the majority of the general consumer does a comparison exercise.
That's my two cents on the price comparison.
TLZ
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Oh yes. We'll move onto the next loop very soon
Danny
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There is a Zelda team, but it consist of a handfull of people like Aonuma, Fujibayashi and a few more. They are the ones coming up with the core concepts and game mechanics of every Zelda game. Then other Nintendo developers join the team when real production starts.
boodream
Paratroopa
The average consumer isn't going to do this kind of exercise, I agree. On the other hand, when you launch any product, its initial price indicates its market positioning. Price is obviously not Nintendo's only differentiating factor, nor even the main one (that's the games available), but it's still one, and a fairly important one nonetheless.
Price sensitivity is very important. Of course, there are people who would buy Nintendo products no matter what. The Switch's success encompasses more than just these people. It includes gamers who also use other gaming platforms, and it also includes an audience simply looking for the best possible value for money.
In my opinion, the Switch's success lies in its ability to appeal to a wide audience. It's not just a console for gamers, it's not just a console for families. That means not alienating anyone, and too high a price tag presents that risk. I may want to buy my Nintendo console for Mario. Or for portability. Or simply because it's more affordable than products positioned differently.
So no, the consumer isn't necessarily going to pull up Google to look at launch prices of other console, you are right. On the other hand, when you price a new product, you set the range and define the target audience. Nintendo's positioning is unique, and that also comes from pricing, which is not a neutral element. When you make the Mario movie to reach a wider audience, it doesn't mean that you're abandoning video game enthusiasts, it means that you're broadening. When you widen your audience, you have to factor that into the price. In my opinion, this is something specifically important for Nintendo.
omniryu
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It isn't necessarily the graphics it is the budget. Which can, sometimes, be the same thing. It can be production, the music, an unnecessary celebrity guess etc.
Leinad
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Yeap, is a instruction level deep learning, without NPU core for calculating (using the GPU for the task).If Im not wrong, that tops number of the PS5 Pro is if the entire gpu is dedicated to doing int 4 operations, in other words not remotely realistic in a real world scenario.
Similar to this:
"DirectML leverages unprecedented hardware performance in a console, with Xbox Series X benefiting from over 24 TFLOPS of 16-bit float performance and over 97 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of 4-bit integer performance on Xbox Series X. "
Defining the Next Generation: An Xbox Series X|S Technology Glossary - Xbox Wire
[Editor’s Note: Updated on 10/21 at 11AM to ensure it is now reflective of the capabilities across both of our next-gen Xbox consoles following the unveil of Xbox Series S.] As we enter a new generation of console gaming with Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, we’ve made a number of technology...news.xbox.com
But my count is wrong... For 150TOPS, they will need to use 50% of GPU (considering all GPU core, make 300TOPS), and I don't know if make sense use 50/50.
For my more modest 80/20 or 70/30 esque, the correct number are between 60 and 90TOPS.
Leinad
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Leinad
Brazilian Nintendo fan!
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Is not speculation after Bowser's fury? Me and my friends said that after the "game" release.
Leinad
Brazilian Nintendo fan!
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It's a candidate for a new Cross gen title...
problem is Mario is less consistent than Zelda. I don't think Bowser's Fury will be a one off, but Nintendo likes to change things up every so often with Mario. who'd a thunk we'd get 3D World after Mario Galaxy 2 (and who'd thunk we'd even get Mario Galaxy 2?)
Leinad
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Yes, but open world is a road not travelled yeat. But you're right! They are very imprevisive with Mario... I dream with a Galaxy 3 that will never happen...
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For my money, my minimum expectation for Switch 2's launch price as well as the most I'm willing to spend to pick it up day one is $450USD. People at one point had informed speculation that Nintendo was aiming for $400? Hot damn!
If it's so much as $451USD or more, I'm holding off until the six month long term reviews come back saying the hardware isn't about to have another 2 Joycon, 2 Drift debacle all over again. I'm still pissed my Smash Pro Controller is experiencing drift where I can't consistently press forward without it rubber banding back to middle, and with the control stick soldered to the silicon I can't replace it myself with some hall-effect control sticks instead.
Controllers are too damn expensive these days and so help me they better be forward compatible with most Switch 2 titles.
If it's so much as $451USD or more, I'm holding off until the six month long term reviews come back saying the hardware isn't about to have another 2 Joycon, 2 Drift debacle all over again. I'm still pissed my Smash Pro Controller is experiencing drift where I can't consistently press forward without it rubber banding back to middle, and with the control stick soldered to the silicon I can't replace it myself with some hall-effect control sticks instead.
Controllers are too damn expensive these days and so help me they better be forward compatible with most Switch 2 titles.
MadMarvainy
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put me strictly in the $400 camp for Switch 2.
Aufhebung RPG
History is tragedy becoming comedy
In fact, I think it's time for a new The Legend of Zelda in the fifth year of switch2's release; we're about to transition from a seven-year console lifecycle to an eight-year console lifecycle, so a new The Legend of Zelda as the second half of the console lifecycle would be appropriate
Giancarlo
Nintendo connoiseur
please dont be too expensive on Brazil(i dont want to sell my kidney to buy the console, no R$5000($996) here, that was PS5 price here, let it be R$3.600 here($600)
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