Why are game companies reluctant to release scrapped projects so people can at least try them?

Why are game companies reluctant to release scrapped projects so people can at least try them? Even in a raw format I'm sure someone would try to get it working so the community can check it out for themselves.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Why are game companies reluctant to release scrapped projects
    >posts "scrapped project" from developer known for tossing out or losing things after buyouts and hard drive crashes, like most Jap devs

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Well I was told that there exists a fully coded pre-release version of Virtua Fighter 3 for the Sega Saturn.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Well that's a nice non-sequiter, but you don't see these scrapped projects "officially" because they're missing, devs don't want unfinished work to be seen that they're embarrassed of, and in the case of Saturn shit don't expect Sega to come up with a solution to emulating it properly considering it took enthusiasts more than a decade for it to be doable on PC.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >don't expect Sega to come up with a solution to emulating it properly considering it took enthusiasts more than a decade for it to be doable on PC.

          Sega was selling emulated versions of Nights for PC back in 2003 or so. It got hacked to run other games and was one of the first Saturn emulators that was playable at full speed and compatible with most titles.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Well I was told that there exists a fully coded pre-release version of Virtua Fighter 3 for the Sega Saturn.
        I was told there were two, one running in high res, one in low res.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I wonder if the people currently working at Sega get annoyed how people always talk about their old games which is why they kinda of half ass stuff like the sega mini.

        I think shenmue saturn is similar to the cutsceneses you see in driver 2 with the movement just a series of keyframes put out by the cpu and environments similar to Virtua cop 2 or even House of the dead on saturn.

        But sega did release those prototype games on the mini.

        Would people really have wanted VF3 with the same graphics as last bronx though. It would have help saturn but been a negative for DC. Still to this day I found that height differences of building and stuff awesome but a lot of people at the time didn't.

        Why are so many threads on this board a variation of "why does this multibillion dollar company not do things to appease a group of 50 autistic people, 48 of which pirate everything anyway"

        At the time of DC I only brought a couple of games a year. If sega did stuff like that now I would buy the shit out everything they make so I feel that Sega was 2 decades too early. For example there are many 40 year old Nintendo youtubers who spends thousands a year on Nintendo stuff each year.

        I have a feeling that is Sega still had a console they would attempt to make their own version of Call of Duty without understanding why is popular and then when it only sells 400k they would cancel the console.

        First, theres the corporate mindset problem. It will cost them some tiny amount of money to even pay somebody to find, package, and release it for no benefit to them, so they dont want to do that. And also they might want to hold on to the concept and assets for future use.
        Second, devs are often embarrassed of unfinished work.

        I would really like if sega catered to the hardcore fan, they are really loyal while the people buy total war are fickle. Nintendo does a good job. Nintendo is the closest to what sega could have been if they continued like before. All ruined before sega became obsessed with those stupid sports games.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Would people really have wanted VF3 with the same graphics as last bronx though.

          Supposedly it was a lot more advanced than that. But even if its just Last Bronx tier, I would've loved to see it. Fighters Megamix doesn't play like VF at all, so the vf3 moves in it do jack shit.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Release a niche product considering its an incomplete game (insert "people buy incomplete games in 2023" joke here)
    >Probably will make no/little money (and even if it did, they'd probably have to pay the people who work on it)
    >Can be used to recycle assets/ideas from for later games
    >99% of companies don't care about the community that much
    >They legitimately don't get the interest.
    There's probably more reasons

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Probably will make no/little money
      it would cost far less than to develop a new thing from scratch. As OP said, it doesn't even need to be playable

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It requires either licensing or abandoning the projects. Both of which are undesirable for for-profit companies.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What, you want companies to release unfinished games and then patched them up later, or wait for the community effort~oh wait...

    But for real, they'll never do that for free.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Where's the monetary incentive in doing so? Also why do you assume they even have the files anymore? The word "scrapped" has a meaning.
    Although, sometimes, it does happen through leaks:
    https://archive.org/details/starcraft-ghost-original-xbox

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why are so many threads on this board a variation of "why does this multibillion dollar company not do things to appease a group of 50 autistic people, 48 of which pirate everything anyway"

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Video game companies are kind of carny and the people running them don't understand why people would enjoy seeing these things, or they just don't care about that minority of customers.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Some artists would consider that letting others search through their trashcans. If only one person on the team who worked on the game feels that way, there is a legitimate reason not to share it.

    And if you don't understand that, then you never produced anything of yourself.

    Then, there are all the legal things to check out when doing something like that, + someone has to find the stuff and decide what and how to share it, after making sure there is nothing sensible within. All this is work, with little profit.

    BTW this post comes from someone who actually goes through games and protos to look for stuff and document it on TCRF. Just putting things in perspective.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    First, theres the corporate mindset problem. It will cost them some tiny amount of money to even pay somebody to find, package, and release it for no benefit to them, so they dont want to do that. And also they might want to hold on to the concept and assets for future use.
    Second, devs are often embarrassed of unfinished work.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      don't forget that they have to do the same certification process that they'd do for a final game, and since the prototype is incomplete, this becomes near impossible to do. Like, is there a chance that one of the devs used a dick pic as a placeholder graphic, which has yet to be changed out in this build? That kind of thing. So releasing *anything* incomplete is a very much more involved and difficult process.

      There are exceptions though. Treasure released a prototype build of a game in a compilation before. However that was a mass produced sample cart, so it was most likely already certified.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why would you share garbage? Yes it's interesting for fans but not for creator. If things were shared widely you also wouldn't be this interested in them.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They either lost the code, or they are stimulating demand for a revival.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I get why they wouldn't just want to sell scrapped projects, but putting them in the final game as a hidden thing is kino.

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