Isn't it like...a little weird that they're not touching the Adventure games in the interest of "moving the franchise forward" while we had to spend like...a decade begging them to stop shoving green hill/chemical plant/sky sanctuary into every single game?
It feels like there's some mandate from above that's preventing things. Takashi Iizuka just gave an interview recently where he said if it was up to him he'd have every Sonic game ever made released on every platform.
Also interesting to note that he says that the budget for a remaster is the same as creating a new Sonic game. I feel like you can read between the lines on that pretty easily, because remasters are usually treated like quick, cheap ways to generate easy money.
Like I've been watching some of Jason Schrier. If you aren't familiar with that name, he's one of the higher profile game press people, very smart guy, works at Bloomberg right now on their gaming side. So I would say he knows his stuff better than most people. But he's started a solo channel on Youtube where he talks about the game industry. Recently he did a video on game budgets and why games cost so much to make.
And he does some quick napkin math on how something like Marathon from Bungie costs an estimated 300 million dollars. The cost of living has gone up, the number of people working on games has gone up, so on and so forth. It adds up very easily.
So I think you can take a step back and say that on the cheaper end of things, 80-100 million dollars is a low end game budget for a AAA studio these days.
I do not think there is a remaster in the world that costs 100 million dollars. Let's look at NightDive. Now the Mobygames credits page for the Heretic/Hexen remaster lists more than 940 people, but in terms of the actual development team there was maybe 45 actual developers who put that remaster together, and maybe 19 of them worked for NightDive.
If you compare that to the credits page for Marathon, it lists 2,700 people in the credits and Jason Schrier says the actual number of people employed at Bungie is more like 400. So it's the same deal; big number in the credits, but a fraction of actual developers. And since some of those were still working on Destiny 2 during the production of Marathon, you could say around 300 people at Bungie made Marathon.
Versus 20-40 people on a remaster from NightDive, a company mostly known for some very high quality work. Some of the best, most robust remasters in the business today come from NightDive.
You see this at Digital Eclipse, too. Again: known for a very high bar of quality when it comes to remastering. Maybe 50 actual developers per project, and nowhere near the numbers credited on a brand new, big budget game.
That means that when compared to a brand new, big budget game, it takes maybe 10-20% of that to make a good, high quality remaster from some of the best remastering houses in the business today.
So when Takashi Iizuka says remastering one Sonic game costs as much as a new game does, he's telling on Sega, either on purpose or by accident. Especially given Sega's track record of bungling remasters. They are not paying top dollar for someone to do them correctly. They are being extra cheap.
It really comes down to someone in a department above his issuing marching orders and he's just trying to keep his job. And that person above him, whoever and wherever they are, they are not seeing the value in legacy content the way someone else might have felt 10 or 15 years ago.
