No, Sonic Mania 2 Wasn't Cancelled Because of "Bad Blood" Between SEGA and Evening Star

Based on how I've seen Simon Thomley comment on his interactions with Sonic Team and Takashi Iizuka himself it sounds more like if pressure or uncooperativeness were to come from anywhere it would be higher up the chain than Iizuka. I think that's what resulted in that mess where Sega tried to pass the buck to Headcannon as to the existence of Denuvo in Sonic Mania's first release and forced Stealth to respond to the matter.

Stealth being incredibly vocal about everything is certainly very interesting, I agree.

I don't think that has a lot to do with Mania's development (or "Mania 2"'s non-development) in general though. The read here is that there was never going to be a Mania 2 in the first place. Stealth's comments appear very much to be his own thing.

I remember being told that there was no way that this was the reason why lmfao by wannabe Twitter experts lol, despite us knowing for years at this point that a 3D game was in development by them.  It's completely fair and understandable for them to want to develop an IP of their own, and while they seem to have at one point thought they could work on Sonic alongside it, things just didn't work out that way.

I can't believe a habitual liar constantly looking for attention turned out to be lying about the reason why a sequel was never made.

Stuff like this is so satisfying to read. I've never, ever trusted "leakers" like the one who was not-so-subtly referenced in the article, and always take the side of "false until proven true."

In the specific case of SEGA vs. Evening Star tho, I never believed it for a second. That's like some tabloid level conspiracy theory shit, lmao.

For the narrative that Sega refused to work with the team again because of Stealth picking public fights with them to make sense logically you have to somehow forget that Sega would never have wanted to work with him in the first place if that was the case. Not waiting until after he worked on a project that delivered Sega a pile of money.

The actual reason is this, and I mentioned this when Superstars was originally announced and people lamented the art style:

Quote

"When you make a 2D game using pixel art, you kind of end up targeting a very specific core audience," he says. "We wanted to bring this game to as many people as possible and in order to really make it look and feel as appealing to a wider audience, we needed to use the 3D assets to really give it that current look. But we do know that core fans want that old Classic Sonic look, they want that old classic Sonic feel, so we focused on making sure the controls were solid and the look and the feel was really representative of a classic Sonic game."

There's no profit in a Mania sequel. Yeah, Mania made money and it was inexpensive to make because they largely farmed it out (though Superstars is also farmed out  and won't cost as much as a CoD game). But people are already immediately skeptical of 2D games that cost full price (remember the backlash Dread got despite being an early strong GotY candidate?). Unless you're releasing a game exclusively for Switch so you can charge whatever the fuck you want for it, there's a hard limit of what you can charge (and therefore make) for a 2D pixel art game and there's intensely more competition in that space than a company is probably willing to stomach for something with a bigger budget and potentially bigger returns. Mania was a sales darling. Critics adored it. Would it have been if it was twice as much game and cost $40 in response?

No. Freedom Planet cost $15 half a decade prior and people have already been conditioned to want to pay no more than $20 for Super Gentendo-esque indie games. It's just like how no matter how much slavish attention you put into a game on the App or Play store, people won't pay more than $5 to get it because they'd rather just download allegedly free titles.

Superstars, in comparison, won't have a AAA game budget. It might not even cost extremely more than Mania did. Sega is going to charge $60 for it, and they will profit handsomely from it in a way that a Mania 2 that people envisioned being a natural followup never would have.

Also:

This makes me twitch to see in a real magazine that people pay for; nevermind outright linked to the original bullshittery.

Aye, I don't like it either, but the received wisdom in the industry is that pixel art and 2D graphics in general only appeal to a core audience and no longer have generalised appeal, and in particular, appeal to children.  It's why, for instance, you never see Nintendo make 2D games any more, and I'm always surprised when I see people who still sincerely expect them (the word, I gather, is that they were burned by Wario Land: Shake It); consider also Square Enix's HD-2D games, which have 3D elements and effects up the wazoo.  There are just too many people who think that 2D graphics (and to an extent 2D gameplay!) are outdated and cheap.  For that matter, Mania itself was actually too good at looking how people remembered; some people still think it was an asset flip that recycled graphics directly from the classics, rather than remaking them from scratch to a higher level of detail.  Hugely frustrating, but the fault is as much with the general public as it is with developers.

Nah I call BS. A small developer who gets the chance to work on big games obviously isn't going to outright state "yeah we got bad blood" with this company I love to work with are they? You'd have to be pretty daft to explicitly state that. For sure they were irked at their work being criticized on Sonic Origins when it turns out they had nothing to do with how poorly it was handled and SEGA with the reputation they have for rushing things, probably rushed things when they weren't ready.
Wasn't there even a tweet where someone from their team was being harassed and they had to outright state that the bugs were not their fault, that their work was fine and handed off and somehow after that was messed up by SEGA? Yeah can't see that making you have any animosity against them at all when you're getting harassed for poor work that you had no hand in and was then fumbled by the other guys.

On 8/1/2023 at 1:47 PM, The-Master-Board said:

Wasn't there even a tweet where someone from their team was being harassed and they had to outright state that the bugs were not their fault, that their work was fine and handed off and somehow after that was messed up by SEGA? Yeah can't see that making you have any animosity against them at all when you're getting harassed for poor work that you had no hand in and was then fumbled by the other guys.

I don't see how Evening Star staff would ultimately care about how SEGA handled a project they weren't involved in?

Even if we assume that they would be miffed at being blamed for something they had no hand in, the logic follows that they'd be miffed at idiot fans who can't tell the difference between Evening Star devs and Headcannon/SEGA devs, not SEGA themselves, no?