A portion of a Gematsu interview with Masaya Matsuura and Keiichi Yano...
G: The goal for the Nintendo Switch version dropped from $4.95 million to $1.5 million, so could you speak to the thinking or reasoning behind that decision?
Yano: “What were you thinking!?”
G: No no, not that at all. (Everyone laughs.)
Yano: “It was pretty simple. First of all game development is, contrary to popular belief, a very expensive endeavor. When we first set our stretch goals, we designed it to have certain types of features; we wanted a full-featured game. The first thing to understand is that at our base level, where we’re shooting for right now–$1.1 million– is we want a good, full-featured game that everyone can be happy with and where we are not cutting corners or doing anything like that.”
G: Not like episodic or something?
Yano: “No no no, we want it to be a full game. On top of that, we had a whole bunch of features we wanted to put in but we just couldn’t do at that level—kind of bonus features. Then add we added them up, and then put the Nintendo Switch version on top of that, that’s how that came to be in terms of where the level is. The community really shouting for a Nintendo Switch version has been very clear to us. (Laughs.) We really appreciate our fans, so we want to make sure that we’re giving them, to some extent, what they want as well. So what we did internally is we revisited how we would approach this, and I think a lot of the misunderstanding here was that, if you look at the stretch goals we used to have, we have all these features and all these stages, and then on top of that for an extra four or five hundred thousand, you got the Switch version. So we weren’t actually charging $3.5 million or anything like that just for the Switch version, it was all the things that came before that that made up the cost. Then we decided to prioritize Switch and thus did a lot of planning in terms of how we could do that. The biggest realization was, ‘if we don’t have to port over all of the features that are in the stretch goals to Switch, then the porting to Switch could be done for a little cheaper than we had planned for.’ That’s how we were able to get the cost down and subsequently get it down to a stretch goal that everybody could be happy with.”\
from GoNintendo
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