After a lot of looking, I've now managed now to figure out a way to make some cuts that preserve the video but remove some of the discussion around game engines that people considered to have problems. Thanks everyone for your feedback!

So $315 million spent on both Wild games combined with a minimum of $2.5 billion back in revenue which is over $2 billion in profit (probably closer to $2.5 billion when you include limited editions, console bundles, amiibo and other merch). I think the mega franchises (3D Mario, Smash, Kart, Animal Crossing, Zelda) make Nintendo around $1 billion profit and the secondary franchises (Splatoon, Mario Party, 2D Mario and Luigi’s Mansion) make around $500 million profit. A crazy place to be financially when you look at the absolute state of the video game industry where teams are spending $50 million on a licence and $50 million on cutscenes like Spider-Man 2 for Sony... Long live Nintendo!!

24:00 "I rather doubt that even Nintendo have ever specifically crunched the numbers for individual games" - I think there's an interview out there where someone fairly senior at Nintendo basically said that they don't have the ability to calculate an individual game's budget due to how the company works.

Note. Havok in of itself is not a complete game engine, but a tool to simulate physics that plugs in to other engines, including Nintendo’s in-house lunchbox engine It is likely that botw was built with an earlier iteration of the lunchbox engine.

How does this guy still only have around 7800 subscribers? The quality of your analyses is astonishing! Quite the opposite of the uninformed, clickbaity prediction videos I see way too many of nowadays.

I genuinely and fully believe, that the Switch is largely to thank for the notable revitalization of the AA market that we've seen this gen. It really is the case that game devs have trouble with arguing for and getting investors to invest in AA projects. To convincingly justify the projects, when the investors see AAA projects worth billions and wondering why you aren't just doing that instead. But to point at the market leading console, and say that you should do AA games for it. Since AA games are all the console can handle. Then that's an easy lock, because as sexy as AAA shit might appear to investors, the Switch numbers speak for themselves. And that in turn has had a broader effect on the industry. Because we've gotten more and more successful AA stories. Which gives people who push for AA projects, more to point towards when arguing for how AA projects can pay off. Instead of every single AA game being some odd exception that could have been cast aside as a fluke.

This channel must take so much work I can’t image how much research you have to do!

Im very excited to see the BotW engine being employed in more Nintendo games. Pokemon could stand to benefit a lot.

This is an extremely well researched and engaging video! I really hope your channel takes off, in depth reporting on the financials of the gaming industry is relatively lacking in the broad scheme of things, so it's wonderful to get a "peek behind the curtain" on that front. Your analysis on the individual staffers that work on each game and how they shifted around over time especially is impressive, these considerations are very rarely taken into account when discussions of the process of video game development are had. Good work, I definitely wanna see more from you!

Tears of the Kingdom still blows my mind...

There were lot of mistake on the engine part. A Game Engine is a mix of lot of different tools that comunicate with each other, a Framework is one of them and are assets specific to one thing that can be used as an easy integretion on an engine (for example Photon is an online framework that can be used on Unity or Unreal projects). Neither BotW or TotK use Lunch Pack. Botw run on an engine called King System that was made only for that title, TotK runs on Module System a new version pf Lunch Pack that we saw for the first time on Switch Sports, and later for Splatoon 3, Mario Wonder and Mario vs DK and Havok is integrated in all of them because it's implemented in the engine. The real reason to why they changed the engine is because Nintendo want to unify it's development tool across all epd divisions and relegate on different engine when they have to work with different companies. While I like the intent of the channel, this is the not the first time that I think you have to do better research on the development process of Nintendo and the teams works

Just found your channel recently, really love how researched your videos are 🔥

Perhaps this video is flawed as others have said but it’s the most thoughtful on the topic that I know of.

This video was truly brilliant! So much work and research, presented in what I felt was a entertaining way! You also helped confirmed some ideas I have had floating around in my head, with areas where Nintendo would save money - like with staff retention for example. Easily earned a new sub here 🙂

Havok is not a graphics engine - it’s a physics engine. It’s not like Unreal, lunchpack, etc. You can use havok on other engines. It powers the physics in Hedgehog engine, for example.

What an underrated video!! Damn good editing and content.

25:11 Breath of the Wild development started in either late 2011 or early 2012… not 2013. Nintendo repeatedly stated that Breath of the Wild took five years to develop, so 2013 wouldn’t make sense in the slightest.

Been putting it off over and over again, and finally last night decided it was time to kill Ganondorf while my friend came over and watched.

Pretty good video, i like how well researched it is.

The soundtrack wasn’t majorly recorded with a live orchestra, most of it was done in software with some soloists and with orchestral pieces reserved for big story moments or as flavor pieces like activating the towers in BotW. A lot of the soundtrack is still done in MIDI and even features some recognizable stock sounds from Apple’s Logic Pro software.

Awesome video! Glad this one showed up in the algorithm.

It is interesting to speculate. I don't know how accurate this estimate is, but I hope other companies realize great games can be made with relatively smaller budgets and not every game needs to be $300M plus.

Wow I’ve never been early for a weather forecast!

This is a fantastic video man. Earned a sub from me

Totk doesnt use lunchpack and instead uses ModuleSystem. BotW uses KingSystem

very interesting. never seen somebody did budget investigation into botw/totk this thorough.

You can actually tell that TotK is running on a different engine if you pay close attention. It's very similar in feel, but things move just a little differently. That said, the similarly to Havoc really says a lot about Nintendo's coding teams and devs, and the flexibility of their engine.

This discussion of Nintendo is my jam. Love the research, context, and insight!

130-185 is both a lot and at the same time less than i was expecting. the simple fact they went for a more low-detail, stylized artstyle probably saved them a lot of time and money

2D Zelda prototype has me thinking when Nintendo had Star Fox Zero after showing the Star Fox Wii U Demo some years ago.

Man that 50min went fast

Damn a 50 minute video? Bro gonna be dropping entire movies at this rate. On a more serious note keep it up with these more indepth/investigative videos! I haven't watched this one yet but I prefer these types of longer vids rather than the shorter or more speculative ones you've also posted lately. I don't know what your analytics look like, but if you're concerned about having to post regularly to keep up with the 'algorithm', then there are definitely channels like Vsauce that do very well despite putting stuff out incredibly rarely (like once/twice a year). Posting less often would also leave more ideas on the table for future content potentially years down the line. I'm also wondering. Don't know if this is answered in the video. If Switch 2 is supposed to be at a PS4-ish level graphically, are we expecting Ninty's game budgets to skyrocket accordingly, much like what we've seen with the rest of the AAA industry in the PS4 generation? Nintendo definitely struggled just with the jump to HD. How could they handle this? Or would improved dev tooling/engines, plus Nintendo's massive recent hiring boosts, cushion the blow in this day and age compared to if they were making such a leap back in 2013 alongside Sony and Microsoft?

Knowing that Breath of the Wild was on a different engine and toolkit (plus licensing costs associated with it) than Tears of the Kingdom makes that rumored Gamescom demo of Breath of the Wild for Switch 2 makes me think that they'll re-release it with the new engine underneath. EDIT: I wish Nintendo would go back and fix localization mistakes via patches, particularly in Zelda games.

Great video, but you should blend the background music a bit more smoothly ❤

This was a good video. Thanks

Good video but I need to point out that Havok is a Physics Engine specifically, NOT a game engine. Havok is something like a plugin that can be adapted into actual game engines. Nintendo has their own internal engine which they likely initially implemented Havok Physics into and then worked off of that.

These videos are surprisingly well researched for a small channel...! Do you have an economics degree or an MBA by any chance?

I know alot of localisation was done by Side UK, they're on my LinkedIn and sometimes post about thier latest Nintendo collab.

is there a point in the video that just gives me the numbers and a breakdown. Ie total cost x million, graphic costs is a, marketing is b, etc.

Not sure if you’re able to do a Forecast video on the yet to be re-revealed Metroid Prime 4, especially since Metroid Prime Remastered last year?

Very extensive and interesting video! Came to watch it after @Commonwealthrealm mentioned it in one of his latest video, great content!

Moevius battle is insane

Game Engines aren't monolithic and the diversity of the games using their new internal engine hints at it being more of a series of interchangeable libraries rather than a complete engine in a box, while the engine on paper would be the new one most likely Breath of the Wild's libraries were integrated into the new engine rather than rewriting everything from scratch.

You make an interesting point of Nintendo reusing to be used in other games. It would make games like botw and totk more cost effective if they use the technologies they developed for those game into new games.

Whatever it was, it made a tidy profit

42:46 Nintendo spend 638 dollars on marketing😱

Wait Scarlet Violet uses the Havok physics engine?

What is the music at the beginning?

I hope Nintendo does not give up on Advanced Wars. My guess is you have seen Mings video on why it did not succeed. My big 3 switch franchises for time played are Splatoon, Zelda and Advanced Wars.

Let’s gooooo Nintendo forecast hour essayyyyy let’s goooooooooo

I will only play Totk at 60fps because after playing Botw for 100 hours I have had enough of how slow and bad it felt, hopefully next year with the switch 2!

Hyrulean -> Hylian

It costed a billion trillion yen, which is equivalent of 1500 dollars

43:55 I think you were meaning to cut this out

Advance Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp, my beloved. 💙

32:33 Wait, are you inplying that there is another Hyrule Warriors game to be released relatively soon?

I expected more than a mere mention of Monolithsoft, they cut half of their workers to go working on BotW, and having all that information... Welp

Stewart from family guy loves Nintendo apparently

Yamauchi "Yama - Uchi"

The remakes fund the respective new titles partially.

am i allowed to cry?

42:45 Nintendo spend 638 dollars on advertising? How cheap! 😀

I’m sure Nintendo is not blowing 300 million $ like western dev lol The way Nintendo makes games is sustainable and that’s what I want to see more from Sony in the future Less graphics more gameplay. Spider-man 2 budget is ridiculous lol. Great video 👍

It’s weird how games don’t publicly reveal their budget like film productions do at this point. Mind you, I don’t believe games should strive to be like movies in ariistic style, like Nobuo Uematsu said “Hollywood-style scores are ruining video game music”. I mean in an economic legitimacy they should, as video games are the highest grossing media/entertainment industry in the world.

Yama-oochi is probably the correct pronunciation 😅

for people in the netherlands, breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom were both 70 euros

100+millions USD for the amazing world like Hyrule is still too cheap comparing to fast-food Hollywood movies.

If you pay 50 developers 200,000 dollars working straight for 5 to 6 years and pay 1 million dollars per year for renting the installation and 10 million total for hardware and research you still won’t get to 100 milllion and that is if they get 200,000 a year wich most don’t. And heck we know they dont work with that many people at once and the whole time.

imagine GTA vi budget

Totk made a billion dollars by itself

The true cost of this game is it's developers lifetime.

Spiderman 2 cost was 300mil??? While gta5 260mil, its ridiculous. Gta is so much more polished, and they didn't do much in terms of city building, most of the stuff was already from the first game. Where does all that money go to...

These games cost more than the budget of the best movies

how the fuck did they waste 185 million dollars on shitty dlc. goes to show bigger doesnt equal better

Bespoke

I wonder if they built upon Botw to create TOTK. Or did they implement all new assets into a new game engine, and then started making the changes where relevant? To account for 6 years later and the Upheaval changes. I’m curious

$18

ai is going to change game development forever in so many ways

I hope many news channels cite you as a source for successfully calculating the budget of both games, that would bring a lot of viewers over to this video

You're mixing physics engines and game engines up a lot and seem to be using the terms interchangeably even though they are very different things. Lunchpack could very well still use Havok as its physics engine. Many game engines do such as Source while others like Unity and Unreal use Nvidia's PhysX. The physics engine is just the code that handles collisions between moving objects and their colliders and not much more. A physics engine will do no rendering or taking user input of any sort. It won't have a visual editor usually. It will be entirely command based. This is because physics engines like graphics libraries are just a programming tool meant to be integrated into a larger project and don't do much on their own. The game engine is the set of tools you work with to create a game. You can keep a game engine mostly the same and just swap out the physics engine under the hood and it can be entirely possible that a developer using the engine might not even notice. Nintendo as far as I can tell has been using the same Lunchpack game engine for both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. A complete change of game engine would make the game feel very different to play and likely look noticeably different and would be kind of a waste. The effort that would be needed to make two games made in two different engines feel the exact same to play is not small. Hyrule Worriors clearly put a lot of effort into making the game look as much like BotW as possible. It's entirely possible that Nintendo may have ditched Havok at some point, perhaps for some technical reason, but that's not really as big of a headline as you make it out to be. Little work by the rest of their team is going to need to be redone with a change like that. It's just going to be technical work behind the scenes to make the new physics engine slot in and work with the rest of the game engine as smoothly as possible. Think of a physics engine in a similar way to graphics libraries. It's not really a big deal when a game developer switches from OpenGL to DirectX or Vulkan or something like that. On PC, some games even ask you which one you would like to use and just switch on start up, and neither will significantly change the player's experience. They'll just each have their own technical strengths and limitations.

Botw and totk don't share engines dude... And ring fit don't share engine with totk either

Havok is not a game engine. I was just thinking about how much of what is being said in videos like this can be trusted; when I come across something I know as a programmer/game tech nerd to be so plainly wrong I begin to question the legitimacy of anything else presented about subjects I am not so intimately familiar with. Thus, I will not watch the rest of the video.

I feel 60€ for a game now is almost a gift with those numbers

2:33 Ah, so budget reasons were the most likely reason Rare was sold :( Ah

✝️ Subbed! God bless in 2024! ✝️

I dont think these games r that expensive.remember tgese games r made in japan and making profits all over the world.

we know Nintendo games are made on a shoe string budget

Wait an minute. Does this mean, that there could be Developers at Nintendo, who spend probably 10 years, a whole damn decade of their life, on working on this two Zelda games? That would be wild.

It sounds like games will continue to be streamlined, homogenized, and otherwise sold out to current trends and whatever is relavent, technologically speaking. Not good for gamers wanting good games.

Idk who needs to hear this but, Tears of the kingdom was infinitely better than Breath of the wild. It’s not even close. Breath of the wild is the worst 3D Zelda game ever made.

"We made two of the greatest games of all time." "What did it cost?" " _Everything._ "

Tbh I find to add Marketing costs pointless. It has nothing to do with the game development. I mean, in what way does Marketing make a game better? They just add it to show bigger Numbers. Because, you know, bigger numbers sound better. But at the end of the day Marketing as absolutely nothing with the games development to do.

No way totk was that expensive compared to botw. Same engine, same base map, underground was automatically inverted. Almost no new assets. Meanwhile cheaper titles have worlds were everything is hand made.

Totk sucks if you’ve played botw