In this investigative video, we're going to try to reverse engineer the budget of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. From the game engine, planning and staffing to the testing, quality assurance, localisation and marketing. We'll be including a look at Nintendo's expectations for sales and the longterm vision Shinya Takahashi set out ten years ago to explain how they budget big projects and show some surprising games that benefitted from the development of these titles. We'll also identify why Shigeru Miyamoto was quoted out of context and review the nonZelda game that may have been hugely important as a milestone for Tears of the Kingdom's development.

00:00 Aims
01:09 They "know nothing about the business" of games
03:25 Nintendo's approach to budgets
05:15 How Miyamoto was misquoted
07:30 The Takahashi plan
11:42 Staffing
15:42 Year by Year
31:19 The biggest cost of all?