AAA budgets have made the news-cycle for over a decade for being so high that often rival major tentpole movie releases. To refresh myself on the topic I looked up how much my 2015 GOTY, Fallout 4 cost to develop and the answer was an unsurprising 150 Million in 2015 dollars according to one Reddit thread. Skip forward 10 years and the budget for one of the biggest titles of 2024, Final Fantasy Rebirth is estimated to have cost Square Enix about $150M in 2025 dollars. Both games being in the same genre must mean RPGs are expensive to make right?
New leaks sourced from what fans have dubbed Terra-Leak 2 containing internal documents from the Pokémon Company actually give us some insight into how much money Nintendo and the Pokémon Company spend to develop each entry in the franchise. It’s not known if these figures include marketing or not and the authenticity is of course isn’t possible to verify.
Before we get to analysis, here are some of the figures:
Pokémon Legends Z-A: 2 billion yen (approx. $13 million)
Pokemon Gen 10: 3 billion yen (approx. $20 million)
It appears that Game Freak / The Pokémon Company / Nintendo are working with a lot less resources per title compared to other major RPG developers. This is very true on a per title basis, given that Pokémon games release every 1.5 – 2 yrs and Bethesda releases a new game about every 5 years or so meaning Nintendo still spends less than their contemporaries.
What do you think of these budget leaks? I’m sure some fans might see these budgets and attribute the much maligned quality of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet at launch. But we’ll never truly if it was a lack of time, crunch or a hectic development schedule that lead to that outcome.
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