Sonic Mania is an overwhelming success with critics, fans, and likely shareholders once the sales numbers come in. This all because someone at Sega was wise enough to stop working against people making fan projects, and start working with them.

If Sonic Mania is successful enough, could that lead to instances of fan projects turned into full official titles? What do you think the likelihood of Nintendo ever doing something like this is? My guess is pretty unlikely, as the thought of having a brand new 16-bit style Metroid game to play through seems too good to be true.

Then again, I guess it doesn't seem any more unlikely than the world ever seeing a good Sonic the Hedgehog game again. First Chinese Democracy, and now this?

Doubtful. The main reason that many publishers go after fan projects is to protect the trademark. If you let people make games with your characters in them without challenge the conventional wisdom is that you risk the trademark for those characters. Publishers don't want to risk control over their IP.

You could imagine ways around this. For example you could create a cheap licensing program where fan-projects have to get permission to use the IP and have certain restrictions, but that creates its own headaches, especially because once you've given permission to something you run the risk of being responsible for it, and, for example, Sega has zero interest in taking responsibility for Sonic original characters, or all the weird sex stuff.

Nintendo tries to exercise extreme control over its IP these days (apparently the Super Mario Movie and 3DO Zelda games left bad tastes in its mouth) and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. They may not go after every fan game just because it isn't practical, but they're probably not going to reward people for making them either. It's notable that the guy who made the AM2R game got hired by a different game studio.

It's also worth noting that this was not a case where someone made a fan game and got hired to make a real game directly. Christian Whitehead was first hired to port a bunch of Sonic games and after he proved adept at that, and showed he was a reliable partner for Sega, only then was he given the chance to make an actual new game. He had to establish a track record doing closely controlled work first. It's unclear how many fan game makers would want to put in the years to do that.

Sonic Mania seems great and it's a great story, but I don't think that it's going to be a template. Sega is a weird company that does experimental stuff (such as its social media presence) and it makes sense for them, but I don't think anyone else will follow suit. As for talented fan game makers being hired to make games...that has been going on for a long time. Many developers got their start in the modding or fan game communities. Western developers have a long history of hiring people who modded their games and did a great job to join their studios. But they generally join as level designers or something, they aren't given the keys to the franchise. I think this was a unique and cool situation that will rarely, if ever, be repeated.

Publishers should fund some of these fan-projects and release them in a official capacity.

No, for the same or similar reasons why anime publishers haven't brought in fan translators to localize their works in an official capacity despite some fans' willingness to do so.

Which ones though? You don't throw money at random people and most fan developers have no track record. Even if they are technically proficient you run the risk of them putting offensive material into an officially licensed product. It's not just a matter of "oh they made a Sonic level and it seems cool." You need to know the people you're doing business with, and be able to trust them.

I don't think so because Sonic Mania was never a "fan project". The game is made by people who formerly created Sonic rom hacks and fan games but Mania itself is a professional release and even the creators should be considered "professionals" since they worked on a number of officially released products before Mania's inception. I think Sonic Mania is a special case where there we a number of hardcore fans that made unofficial fan games in their youth, they grew up to make games professionally and eventually got to work on the franchise they love. It is a situation that is almost impossible to replicate. If anything I think Sonic Mania will inspire publishers to make more retro remakes of 90s franchises but that is already happening so Mania really isn't starting any new trends.

That's for the publishers and developers to handle. If a partnership doesn't work out, it doesn't. It's not like a shipped product would be unchecked for potential offensive material and other things.

Well if the partnership doesn't work out, that's the publisher losing out on money, because outside of really REALLY fervent fans, there's no one who's going to agree to develop a game for free. A risk averse publisher would likely much rather they go with their own internal developers than bring in a third-party when there's no guarantee that'll work out.

@videogamemobes: Ok, sure you can avoid publishing something with offensive material most of the time (Easter eggs and secrets with unauthorized material have been around since the 2600.) But how do you know whether they can handle the project management requirements? Are they able to polish the games sufficiently? Can they hit a deadline?

Most publishers don't want to work with unknown people for this reason. Even when you see publishers work with Indie studios it's usually people who have industry track records. If someone worked at an Ubisoft studio for 10 years then they know the industry well enough that you can likely trust them. If they just made a ROM-hack you know nothing.

That's why the more common path is to hire fan-game makers to join established studios. We saw this with the AM2R guy. He didn't get funded to make a new Metroidvania. He got hired to work at Moon Studios as a level designer, where his talent can be put to use in a situation where they do have a proven project-management track record.

I'm just saying that it's easy to sit back and say that publishers should work more with the fan-game community when it's not your money or reputation on the line. I think it would be great if they did more stuff, but I understand why they don't. I'm playing devil's advocate a little here I'll admit, but I think that as fans of games it's easy for all of us to get swept up in the stuff we like and not think about the practical realities of a complex and expensive business. Handing over the keys to one of your best IPs to total unknown quantities is a risk without a ton of upside (And that's not what happened with Sonic Mania. Again, by the time he got to make Sonic Mania Christian Whitehead had a proven track record with Sega.)

Sega was never really working against fan creations. That is more of a nintendo thing. They are probably more open to fan stuff then any major Japanese publisher. Capcom has also been pretty ok.

In theory this is always about copyright protection but certain companies have always been more zealous then others about it.

You mean like how Team Four Star of DBZ Abridged fame is doing the official dub for Hells?

As time goes on I do think the potential to have the makers of these fan games involved in an official product is increasing.

This has reminded me of Bethesda's proposed 'Creation Club' thing. They are going to have approved mod makers submit stuff and then put it through their own internal QA before officially offering it for sale.

I guess the difference is mods aren't generally shut down like fan games have been in the past, but it's still making that fan content official.

I think it certainly helps legitimize fan games to some extent. Would have been very cool to see Nintendo take AM2R under it's wing, in the same way, but I guess they already had their own thing in the works. And in general perhaps don't feel as in need of outside assistance as I feel Sega might be. Though with Metroid specifically, it seems to me that Nintendo actually could use the help.

@bigsocrates: @afabs515: I like how both of you insinuated I think publishers should court even the most amateurish of fan developers just cuz. Like, that's not my angle. If a unlicensed fan project shows promise and it makes sense (ergo, it'd break even if sold at the very least), publishers should consider contacting the developers and talk. Find out if they'd be up for the task of managing some amount of funding or whatever angle they take on it. I've seen enough unlicensed fan projects like AM2R, Sonic 2 HD and Sonic: Before The Sequel / After The Sequel that I think could easily be sold with some touch-ups through funded development. You could brand games differently, make the differences between it and "canonical" games or whatever clear. I understand that it's a risk to reach developers without a ton of professional experience, but I don't want to imply the skill / experience levels of people just because they are involved in unlicensed fan projects.

@videogamemobes: Speaking for myself, that's not how I interpreted your comment. My point was...quality control and figuring out who you can trust takes time and resources. Even if your intent is to work only with the very best, it's not always obvious who those people are. Promising projects fall apart or go sideways all the time. We see that with Kickstarter, for example. It's not necessarily that publishers couldn't navigate these waters but it's a cost benefit analysis. Do they want to go through the expense and hassle and what are the benefit?

And then there are the collateral consequences. If you wait until projects are good and then buy them, you are encouraging more people to make projects, which you don't want. Will the fan community have the expectation that you buy up all the promising projects? What happens if someone makes a project on spec and you don't want to buy it, do they junk it or just release it anyway?

You're encouraging all kinds of behaviors you don't want, and dealing with unknown quantities.

It's a minefield.

That's why it's easier to just condemn all fan projects (at least formally and officially), and then bring on promising programmers or designers as employees and let them prove themselves ina controlled, managed environment. Which is what Sega did with Christian Whitehead.

Not really. Sega itself was never a big fan of fan-made games. They shut down the Streets of Rage fan-made (after 8 years of development) and many others. The difference here is that those guys proved to be good developers, working on official projects, like the Sega CD re-release. Sonic Mania is not a fan-game, it's an official game, developed by professional developers that just so happen to be fans of the IP whom used to work on fan-games.