Kogen wrote:What I have always found odd was the apparent disinterest publishers and unofficial developers have with working together.
There's a lot of reasons why they wouldn't want to work with each other. From the fangame developer's view, they'd have to fallow Sega's rules - how long development is allowed to last (Sega probably wouldn't let it last as long as it did for this), how it's distributed, how it was focus tested ("Polygonal graphics are more popular than sprites, let's us them instead!"), other little things about the design, etc. Not being tied to Sega provides freedom. They can make the game that they want to make, instead of making something Sega thinks will sell. And they don't want to be paid to do this kind of work. They do this for fun in their free time. It's fairly well
psychologically accepted that you enjoy your work less as you get paid more (although it may make other parts of your life easier).
Even if one of these fan developers wanted Sega to distribute their game at the end of development, Sega probably wouldn't want to. They have their release list planned out well in advance, finding the best times when to release a game - when is the competition releasing other popular games, what is the demographic, what other non-game things could interrupt sales for this demographic, are Sega's own games overlapping in appeal within a close time frame (a good example of this is when Nintendo released DKCR and Epic Yarn fairly close to each other), etc. Sega also doesn't want to encourage teams to just start doing things with their properties without permission in fear that it could be mistaken as Sega's doing and decrease their goodwill.
I'm not saying I agree with these perspectives, but these are some reasons I'd guess they don't want to work together.
But I think the real reason Sega is doing anything with this is that this team is accepting donations.
