Former Nintendo marketing leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang revealed on their podcast that recent leaked figures for the next-generation Pokémon Wind/Storm development budget may be incomplete. A major leak from a few days ago claimed that the next main-series Pokémon game is titled Pokémon: Wind / Storm, and that its development budget is ¥3 billion (about RMB ¥142 million).

On their latest podcast, Ellis and Yang explained that they suspected as much: the development cost of many Switch-exclusive games is probably lower than that of 3-A titles on other platforms. For instance, previous leaked budgets for The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West dwarf the claimed budget for Pokémon: Wind/Storm.

Nevertheless, the two still found the figure of ¥3 billion / ~$20 million surprisingly low. Ellis stated: “Even though I expected it would be lower, this number still shocked me.” He further speculated: “$20 million probably only covers the game development itself; the total budget also includes marketing and other expenses—which for the Pokémon series must be a huge outlay.”

Yang added: “While we were at Nintendo we never had direct exposure to development budgets, but we were very aware of marketing scale. As a core 3-A project for Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, the marketing budget must be substantial.”

The above content is compiled by ModeZone, a fashion and entertainment magazine.