Fully prepared for the timeline we're in to have zero Metroid in the possible February Direct, resulting in yet another cycle of despair and recrimination, before Nintendo go double Prime in summer with a Prime HD/Prime 4 joint reveal; the former for October 2023, the latter for 2024.
Yeah, it's gonna be Dread all over again lol. We knew about 2D Metroid game coming for awhile before it was revealed. 2021 they simply announced it at E3 for release less than four months after. I'm expecting the same thing for the Prime Remaster, I don't think they'll announce the game at the February Direct unless it surprisingly is a June game.
I'm still 100% confident in this. Metroid will be at the next Direct. Prime 4 or Prime Remasters who knows. But Metroid will be there. I also just have a strong feeling its February 8th. Just seems perfect
I wouldn't be so confident...
If the game is fall 2023 they will probably wait for announcement at E3 like happened with Dread.
We can't possibly know what budget Prime 4 has, and it being "one of the most expensive" when we've not seen so much as a screenshot is definitely wishful thinking.
Animal Crossing New Horizons, a game that's actually probably in competition for most expensive game Nintendo made,
entered development some time after New Leaf released and well before the team had any idea what the Switch would be.
Yes, they had to write years of development off, that probably happens way more often than any of us can guess, but in most cases Nintendo (and many companies!) don't talk about projects until they're close to release because those kind of write offs happen way more often than they'd like to admit. The actual work that'll have gone in to Prime 4 is at just over 4 years now, and ostensibly includes a remake of Prime 1 within that time too. The development of Prime 4 simply would not have been greenlit if they expected it to need to get something well over the previous series bests in order to justify the development, because that would have been insane. (Reminder that they only expected New Horizons to match New leafs lifetime sales, and that's a far more important series).
Oh, exactly. I'm putting all of this in mind actually. Nintendo never reveals the budget of their games so all we can do is speculate based on development time and size of the teams.
Animal Crossing New Horizons, while having an insane development time considering its pre-production, would already be accountable for the period from 2016/2017-2020 when a whole chunk of EPD was working on it. Breath of the Wild had 4 years of development but involved a lot of people working on it, peaking at 300.
Even with Metroid Prime Remaster being worked on from 2017-2021, and even if during 2019-2021 it was like 50:50 between people working on MPR and MP4, I don't see how Prime 4 will finish its development by 2024 without being at least on the same league as Animal Crossing New Horizons, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey in terms of budget.
But that doesn't mean Nintendo is expecting some gangbuster sales from it or it selling insanely more than any game in the franchise. Metroid Dread was a high effort work that had a 4 years development title, with Nintendo knowing the roof of how much it could sell wouldn't be even 5M, but we're still super happy with its sales performance.
Also, we kinda got used to some big numbers on Switch era with BotW, ACNH, Odyssey and etc but most AAA games that cost like double of those games to make never sell anywhere near that well. The game that comes to mind is Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is on the list of the most expensive games of all time and sold about ~5 million and the publisher is satisfied with it.
