LogFAQs > #962173729

Mac Arrowny posted...

Budget is a measure of time * # of employees. Gamefreak has under 200 employees, and puts out a Pokemon game every other year. Compare that to something like Breath of the Wild, which had over 400 employees working on it for over 5 years (300 from the core team and 100 from Monolith), or Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which had 1000 employees working on it for 4 years, and you can see the difference budget makes. The reasoning I've heard for this is that The Pokemon Company forces them (does TPC own Gamefreak? Not sure about the relationship) to put out frequent Pokemon games in order to sell more merchandise, since the merchandise makes way more money than the games.

This is true, but it's worth nothing that GF have that few employees by choice. Something about wanting to remain a tight-knit studio. And as others have said, GF are part of the decision to put out a Pokemon game every year (ish), so it's either just a lot of unfound confidence to deliver a quality product despite lacking the manpower and technical skills or they know people will buy it anyway and until they don't, Nintendo and Creatures don't have a good reason to force them do it any other way.