if you look at those chart things (which arent official confirmed numbers)
Yakuza 0 sold 110.000 copies in the first week in the west. just in the first week, not in total.
on vgchartz it says that Yakuza 0 sold 190.000 copies in Japan and 60.000 in other regions besides Japan, NA and EU
and thats not true, because Segas official numbers from the year 2015 (!)
were already at 500.000+ within Japan and chinese speaking regions
Well I just started playing Yakuza Zero (which is fantastic) and I'd say the graphics are roughly on par with the latest Shenmue III screens we've gotten. I'd say that's an indicator that they're in the same ballpark funding-wise.
Oh and yes I can confirm that VGChartz is pretty much never accurate.
I don't really think Yakuza 0 looks too impressive graphically outside of the cutscenes. I think what I've seen of Shenmue III looks more current gen. I could be wrong, but wasn't Yakuza 0 developed with the PS3 in mind? I won't try to compare the art styles.
My response might be a combination of what we've seen already but I'll try to get to the point and try to answer your question directly.
The approach to building/financing Yakuza games is a lot different to most games. Once the foundation is built with the current engine they're using. Right now they're on their 3rd engine with 6/K2 (called 'The Dragon Engine'), the first two engines they had were very similar to each other also, the structure of the engine is incredibly modular that avoid much of the rippling effect game developers normally face, rather the content just cascades as intended.
The way Yakuza games are designed is such that: once the foundation is made (i.e.the main city, fighting engine, animations, mission structure/logic) it's incredibly painless for them to develop a cost effective pipeline for them to inject stories, missions and novel content.
The dev team is such where they are setup to work extremely efficiently. Once [the ambitious and expensive] Yakuza 5 was in development (marking the 2nd engine, heavily modified from the first original engine) it created a solid foundation for 0, Ishin and K1.
One of the previous comments mentioned that the Japanese sales of these games have declined. This is true, Yakuza games now sell around a quarter less of what they use to do in Japan. They can no longer hope to develop these games solely for their domestic market anymore. HOWEVER, there's been a growth/surge of interest for Japanese game in the West compared to a decade ago and games on average consistently perform stronger than ever (ever since Valkyria Chronicles 1 remastered on steam managed to come third place on steam charts behind CoD and Assassin's Creed for several weeks with minimal development costs and marketing/advertising, SEGA knew they ere onto something). Supposedly, this encouraged Shenmue 1&2 to be more feasible for them (although I'd say it's partially the reason for Shenmue but I digeress).
Shenmue has it's own advantages and disadvantages compared to the development of Yakuza. For one: Yu Suzuki is allowed A LOT more time to develop his game compared to a traditional Yakuza game (normally ranging as little as 6 months for Kiwami 1 to [rarely] as long as 2 years for Yakuza 5.
Yakuza 6 hoped to have a longer development cycle as it was a new engine/finale but it couldn't as it had to meet it's deadline of December 2017 in order to maintain it's annual release schedule. This lead to their vision being compromised, content/features being reduced/missing, maps being smaller, the engine being "unfinished" (their words) and overall the level of polish being reduced. This is a series that has to work through iteration, which we can see in the upcoming Kiwami 2 being able to bring back many of the original game staples (such as original map size, weapons, coliseum, martial arts trainers etc).
A couple of months ago, Nagoshi himself said "It's estimated that yakuza 6 has sold 800k-900k globally, matching that of what the games originally sold for yakuza 1 and 2" so essentially the western market has helped make up for the underperformign sales in Japan.
As most of us know: Shenmue was aimed towards a global audience (which is a difficult thing to pulloff) and despite the strong performance for it's first entry globally: Japanese sales were weak. Only so much could be done with the dreamcast platform and building a franchise that was hoping to recoup sales over a period of time.
Yakuza 1's development strategy was to not focus on a global audience but instead focus on a mature audience and go all in on their domestic territory. It was a huge risk (and Nagoshi said he would resign if it didn't work) but it did. Now though this strategy has had to evolve, they budget and sell for a global audience in mind but still develop their games with a japanese audience in mind and over the many games they've established a very specific formula in mind.
So yeah, overall: it doesn't really help much to compare direct budgets this way because both ys.net and rgg stidios operate so drastically differently from each other, with visions, expectations, devs on board, preemptively working towards the games ahead etc. That may seem like a cop-out answer but it's true, where a game like Yakuza 6 was expensive: the future games will help subsidise those costs by reusing the same fundamentals.
This is how the Kiwami games were achievable in such a short period of time (as little as 6 months total) because they splice together the old cutscene animations with the new (mostly yak6) models; inside a yak6 city with yak6 fighting mechanics and yak2 mission logic.
IF (fingers crossed) Shenmue 3 becomes a success I hope they can carry forward much of the foundation they've created with unreal 4 for a hypothetical shenmue 4 and/or 5. It can't be expected of them to have a quick turnaround because Shenmue isn't built in mind to be an annual series like that with familiar/repeated elements. It's expected Shenmue 4 and 5 will visit different cities/countries/locales so that would already require more R&D/production work= more time.But hopefully they can establish a solid foundation with the engine/code, models, common animations and fighting engine in order to bring over and/or iterate these elements for the next game to have a considerably quicker turn around.
But as it stands: budget is likely not equivalent to a Yakuza game, because it's not being financed/developed/project managed the same way or share the same length of development cycles. Game dev can't really be matched by finance alone: it's a lot more organic then that and requires work/assessment through iteration and skill/talent from the developers.
Sources: CNBC article with SEGA Japan CEO, RGG Book Translation, SEGA Show Lievstream
Yeah, VGChartz sucks. And uhh, yeah sorry for not being succinct enough I suppsoe ?
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