How do you know how much Nier cost? (none of us do) and the likes of Nioh have been in production since the PS2 and for all this talk of 700 staff how many of those staff worked only on RE 7. A lot Japanese corps have lines and so have staff that are able to work on multiple projects at the same time, never mind a lot of the RE 7 staff were outsourced.
The bias on this board is bonkers somtimes. RE 7 is a sales disaster, so is Forza Horizon III, Halo V, but games like Yakuza, Nier, Nioh are success stories and so is Horizon Zero Dawn, Which its self had huge staff working on it and lots of outsourcing is a hit despite is selling less than Halo V and just as much as RE 7
Because
Yoko Taro himself said that they didn't even had enough budget to make any DLC for the game. They had to rip off assets from OG Nier on PS3, to even make that one DLC that they released a few months ago.
Again, you are ignoring the context and just seeing conspiracy theories. Yakuza and Nier both have been said to be very successful games, by the devs themselves and anyone who actually follows Drakengard and Yakuza series, will know that's true. Whereas recent mainline RE games have sold more than 5 million copies and Capcom expected RE7 to sell 4 million by the end of March 2017 and wants it to sell more than 5 million copies by March 2018.
You seem to have this wrong notion that selling 3 million copies, means that the game is doing great no matter what was its development cost. Well, you might wanna tell that to Square Enix, cause TR 2013 sold 3.4 million copies when it was released, yet not only
SE was disappointed, but they actually reported
extraordinary loss from TR and other SE games at the time for not meeting their sales expectations.
Like I said, you can't take a number and say that it is good or bad for any and every game.
I'll say Yakuza 2 is the better game myself and Yakuza is a series that hasn't grown its user base since the 2nd game. The series can barely sell close to a million units per title even though its got hundreds of staff working on it and its meant to be one SEGA's biggest IP
Yakuza games are not that expensive to make. They don't need to sell 1 million copies to be profitable, since the RGG studio members are masters of reusing assets and working on a budget. In the past 12 years since the series was first created, SEGA has released 13 mainline and spin-off Yakuza/RGG games, and is planning to release 2 more next year. You don't release 13 games over the course of 12 years (15 in 13 years), if you are not making profit.
Again, you cannot compare Yakuza to big name games like RE and say that people are being hypocrites by saying that Yakuza is doing well, but RE needs to sell more.
Also you got some nice dodging skill there. Like I said, Yakuza 0 is the best selling Yakuza game in the west. So, stop acting like Yakuza 2 was the peak for the series from a commercial point of view.