Just curious if the overall budget of part 3 is equivalent to a ps4 yakuza games

The development budget for Yakuza 0 was approximately $30 million USD.

Yakuza 6 was even larger due to the fact that it was a more ambitious game, as well as the team had to develop their new in house engine.

This gets me to wondering how Sega is making any money. Yakuza 0 global sales are currently at 570k, which means that they’re just barely breaking even. A shame really because the Yakuza games are quite good.
 
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WildManofBorneo said:
The development budget for Yakuza 0 was approximately $30 million USD.

Yakuza 6 was even larger due to the fact that it was a more ambitious game, as well as the team had to develop their new in house engine.

This gets me to wondering how Sega is making any money. Yakuza 0 global sales are currently at 570k, which means that they’re just barely breaking even. A shame really because the Yakuza games are quite good.
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Where'd this come from?
 
If Yakuza is barely breaking even how can Nagoshi afford to get all that plastic surgery?
Maybe it lives up to its name and the game's entire existence is just a cover for some money laundering scheme.
 
maybe Yakuza is in the 20-30 mil range. we dont know how expensive the voice actors are.
also Yakuza is using real licences, real JAV persons and the likeness of well known japanese actors.
so maybe its way more expensive than we think.
but: back then when Yakuza 4, 5 and Yakuza 0 were only available in Japan,
the sales numbers were around 300.000 - 600.000 and Sega was totally fine with that.
Sega wasnt even planning to release Yakuza 5 in the west. so this doesnt really match up with a high budget.
 
So it's okay to get poor sales yet greenlight sequels... unless it's Shenmue. Can't help but feel a little bit bummed out.
 
I REALLY doubt it cost 35 mil. Sega would'nt keep funding it if it were the case Yakuza simply does not sell enough for that.
 
Sonoshee said:
So it's okay to get poor sales yet greenlight sequels... unless it's Shenmue. Can't help but feel a little bit bummed out.
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I agree, Seems like Shenmue I will forever be saddled with this "$70 million budget" and "every DC owner would need to buy 2 copies to break even" soundbites. Even though that dollar amount isn't accurate, it's not fair.

I think people forget that before Shenmue, "scale" was thought of more as smaller things you could consume, like a game with a ton of levels, or maybe like a Resident Evil, where there's a "whole mansion" to explore, but in reality was a character running across a vast series of .jpeg files. There's a reason we all sat there for a half hour opening drawers in the Hazuki Dojo to look at all the awesome clothing textures.

Someone had to do all that work. And I remember a very old pre-launch video of Shenmue development with a ton of people at computers, it looked like the stock market in there. Game way ahead of its time.
 
As I mentioned before, the licensing in Yakuza is actually a big deal, because not only are there the likenesses of actual real life JAV/Gravrure models, there are real life magazines as well such as shonen king, SPA, Degenki PlayStation, TV Bros, Weekly Shonen, Famitsu, etc. And there are the real life Joysound Karaoke machines in Yakuza 6. All of that liscening really can't be cheap at all.
 
Why do people keep using Kingdom Come Deliverance as an example for budget? The game is made in Czech Republic where they can hire 3 people for the price that you can hire one person in Tokyo. You don't get better graphics by putting money into a machine but by hiring good developers. A $30 million budget for a game being made in Poland will go a lot further then it will for YsNet.

People seem so fixated on the budget but the reality is we don't know and even if we did it's nothing to go on. If it had the same budget as Yakuza what YsNet may have to spend it on may be greatly different to the Yakuza team. The Yakuza team has their own engine which can make development easier and save on costs. YsNet are using Unreal 4 which may make certain parts of development easier then the Dragon Engine but they may have to spend more on other things.

Even if Yu Suzuki came out tomorrow and said the budget is $23,345,000 we'd have no idea what that means or what they're spending it on.
 
Sonoshee said:
So it's okay to get poor sales yet greenlight sequels... unless it's Shenmue. Can't help but feel a little bit bummed out.
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Those aren't poor sales at all. The truth is that those Japanese sales figures represent the shift in Japan away from home consoles and towards handhelds. Yakuza is one of the top selling console series in Japan.
 
I always assumed that the Yakuza games were some of the cheapest productions ever in gaming.

Like, they reused the same old gen-ish graphic engine with slight improvements for ages, every single one of them straight up recycles an huge amount of assets, when they introduce new cities or graphical engines it's always very safe, gradual and spreaded over multiple entries, and when they sell about 300/400k copies in Japan they make a profit and Sega looks happy about it. Also, if i recall correctly Nagoshi or someone else claimed that the VA and the guest stars are what cost them the most during the production of these games.
Am i wrong?

On the other side, Shenmue 3 is going to have completely new assets and is going to have multiple cities to explore.
I think it's going to be way more expensive.
 
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Yakuza is actually pretty big in Japan so they’re getting most of their sales in the domestic market. Plus, I headed it’s big in South Korea as well.
 
The thing with the Yakuza games is that the engine and a lot of the assets are reused. There are the Kiwami games as well which a smaller team are re-making the original games. Yakuza 6 had a much larger budget as it was a main numbered entry and they created a brand new engine (Dragon) that only runs on latest gen (the previous games up to kiwami 1 was using the PS3/4 engine that powered Yakuza 5)

Shennue is making a similar saving by using the Unreal engine that does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of graphics and effects. It also makes prototyping a lot easier - that launch video was probably made quite speedily.

So I would imagine that Yakuza 6 would of had a higher budget than Shenmue 3 but the spin off games (Kiwami, Ishin! etc) would be made on a similar budget. Since Shenmue was made there are a large amount of development tools that can be used off the shelf to create a Shenmue esque game even by small studios on modest budgets.

Shenmue first time around cost so much money but was tollerated as a way to show off the Dreamcast (also they lost a lot of money making the game for Saturn that was then canned) this time around there is no platform to support other than Sony chucking some money at it to show they support gamers (a theme with their marketing and image around the PS4).
 
WildManofBorneo said:
This gets me to wondering how Sega is making any money. Yakuza 0 global sales are currently at 570k
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WTF REALLY? Wow, I always knew if was a bit of a niche series but I had no idea it was doing that poorly... Really brings things into perspective...
 
vgchartz doesnt have official numbers. its only estimated and they dont even have sources for their data.
vgchartz is listed as unreliable source on Wikipedia.
the only official Yakuza sales numbers are directly from Sega.

you can easily check this - Yakuza 0 570.000 - doesnt make any sense
because by the time of 2015, the sales numbers were already at over 500.000 just in the asian regions.
the release in the west was 2 years later.

so did it sell 70.000 copies in the west? doesnt make any sense.

Yakuza 6 vgchartz numbers = 550.000,
Segas numbers = already sold over 1 mil copies and its the biggest Yakuza launch in the US ever.
 
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Well, the Yakuza series usually makes really small numbers in the west (about 50k Usa and Europe combined) and the Japanese sales are declining with each entry. What we know is that it finally started to reach niche status n the west with Yakuza 0 (about more than 100k-ish?) and that it's also having some kind of growth in the other Asian market.
 
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