Hattori Kiyoshi stared at those two words, the abacus in his head beginning to click. As an old hand in finance and operations, he had a natural sensitivity to cost control.
"The latter costs more. It requires using the existing 3D engine to remake an old game from start to finish," Nakayama Takuya continued explaining. "But the script, level design, character settings, even the main musical themes are all ready-made. It saves the long early stages of trial and error and planning. More importantly, it can cut publicity and distribution costs by more than half."
It was worth noting that old IP came with its own traffic.
The people who had played the originals back then had now grown up and gained independent financial ability.
What they were buying was not just a game, but also the youth they could never return to.
Hattori Kiyoshi wrote several numbers on the paper and drew a line.
"A tiny investment for ten-thousandfold profit." The old man's assessment hit the nail on the head. "Using an old IP as the foundation and pairing it with the visual expressiveness of a new platform, the profit margin difference in between is at least forty percent higher than developing a brand-new IP. This is a commercial model with extremely high ROI."
"More than that." Nakayama Takuya gave an even more optimistic forecast. "The core audience base is fixed. As long as the quality doesn't collapse, these people are natural running water, and they'll spontaneously recommend it to new players. Word of mouth ferments far faster than conventional publicity. New players fall in because of the visuals; old players pay because of sentiment. We take both ends."
This was precisely one of the core driving forces behind Sega's acquisition of Sotsu.
Sotsu held Sunrise animation's copyright lifeline