V
Oldschool DMC fan
It's not hard to see, it's a fact. I know how the industry works, and I know how businesses operate, since I run one myself.
NT has been contracted to do this by CAPCOM, so they have the task of marketing this to the West. Call it 'creative problem-solving', and the brief they have been given is to reinvent it so Westerners will think it's awesome. However creatively they do that, they need to make it sell, because that is their job, and it is what they have been paid to do. They've not been paid to sit around coming up with random ideas and doing whatever they feel like.
Then the chances are you'd be sitting at home behind a desk writing games for yourself that would never come to be household-name multi-million shifters like the Devil May Cry games, or any of the other big sellers over here. One person's sense of fun alone can't do the work necessary to create games of this calibre and scope in the time allowed, you need a team, which needs to be paid and therefore backed up by investors who always want a profit in return; therefore what begins as a labour of love or a passion ends in the Games Industry as a part of a larger machine that must self-sustain. How many big games out there do you see that someone sat there doing by themselves for a laugh? And how many studios still in existence can you name that are not making a profit on their games, and not trying to...?
If you want to make small-time games for your own amusement more power to you. But you would never be able to create a game like DmC like that with current technology. The only way to make games like that at the moment and to balance the books is to make sure what you spend 3 years developing is definitely going to sell millions of units and to do that it has to be something people are attracted to, and the risks of your creative decisions MUST be carefully weighed up. Or else you are screwed.
I have already said that Game Industry workers probably do it for some personal fulfillment on the personal level, there's certainly worse you can do for a job... but not on the studio level; in the real world you don't get to do anything for 'fun' for a living unless you make a living first and foremost. They don't make games purely for fun. They make games because they like what they do, but ultimately their games are made to be sold, to turn a profit and to increase their AAA resume.
In short, what NT are doing with DmC isn't pure creativity— more a balancing act between adpating the existing IP to make it appeal to a wider audience and what creativity they can allow themselves within those (unenviable) constraints.
