The Pokemon Generation 10 budgets that were included in the latest round of unverified but sweeping Game Freak leaks likely aren't the full amount, according to Nintendo's former marketing leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang.
Last year's Pokemon leaks popped back up again this week with information about Pokemon Legends: Z-A and beyond. Most notable was the supposed title for the next mainline game, Pokemon Winds and Waves, and a budget reportedly hovering around $20 million or 3 billion yen (all of which should be taken with a pinch of salt since budgets can change and leaks can be false).
During their most recent podcast, Ellis and Yang explain that they already had an inkling that most Switch exclusives probably didn't cost as much to make as blockbusters on other consoles. The leaked Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West budgets make Pokemon's alleged allowance look like chump change, for example.
But the duo weren't prepared for how low the budget for Gen10 was said to be. "Even this information here was kind of shocking for me to see," Ellis says.
"I will say, I think that [the $20 million figure] is strictly the game production and there are other things that go into the total budget, like marketing, which for Pokemon games is a significant amount of money," he continued.
"That money we do know about," Yang said of their time at the company. "The development budgets we never saw, but for sure, the marketing budgets we understand what that is like. And obviously this is a AAA game, a very important game for Nintendo and The Pokemon Company to market. So those marketing budgets were pretty significant."
Marketing for Pokemon also gets a bit murky when you consider it's constantly on the cross-media promotion train. Card packs, new seasons of the anime, merch, the games, Pokemon GO, and events with various museums are constantly feeding into making sure the series never leaves the public consciousness for too long.
For now, check out the full Pokemon Legends: Z-A map and find out how to catch all legendaries in Pokemon Legends: Z-A.
