Well, this thing has been in development since 1998![0] Furthermore, SEGA has historically been very lenient with the Sonic community, where you can see protot

Well, this thing has been in development since 1998![0] Furthermore, SEGA has historically been very lenient with the Sonic community, where you can see prototypes of the games out in the wild being discussed [1], a yearly fangaming/ROM hacking contest [2][3] and a lot more. And of course you have 16-bit remakes and Sonic Mania, where former modders ended up being scouted by SEGA to work on official games. While SEGA could change their instance some day, I believe the current situation is beneficial to them, as even their marketing team (i.e the official Sonic twitter) is made up of former fandom members. [0] https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/Versions https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/Versions [1] https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Dreams_Come_True:_Sonic_1_(MD)_Prototype https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Dreams_Come_True:_Sonic_1_(MD)... [2] https://sonicretro.org/2021/10/18/shc-2021-the-results-are-in/ https://sonicretro.org/2021/10/18/shc-2021-the-results-are-i... [3] https://sagexpo.org/ https://sagexpo.org/