What exactly has happened in recent years to make you think Retro Studios is far different now? They still don't care about marketing their games (leaving that all up to Nintendo), they still will take as long as possible to release a game to ensure it's up to their standards. Developers come and go, philosophies stay.
I didn't say they are far different. But it's quite a big step to assume that they're the same or basically the same.
The biggest factor would be simply time. People change (what they want to make, how they feel about games, maturity etc), people leave the studio and new people join.
Gaming has been around long enough for there to have been studios that have existed for decades. I think at some point gamers will have to recognise that studios cannot logically stay frozen in time as the same group entity (collection of people) that made certain games at certain times, that they cannot stay like that forever.
Can you imagine someone in 2100 saying of, say, Retro that their new Metroid Prime game will definitely be great because 'they' put out Metroid Prime 3 over 97 years ago?
At what point does a studio practically have little to no connection to the entity (group of people with certain leadership) that made a certain well-liked game may years ago?
I think this idea actually becomes quite unfair at some point to whoever staff are working at a studio at a later time because they simply aren't at all responsible for what a different set of staff under different leadership did many years prior, you know?
I can't be the only person who sometimes finds it a bit odd when people earnestly say "well that studio put out this classic 25 years ago [!!!] so they should be able to put another one now".
It doesn't really work like that in reality, does it? One day every single person who had meaningful input into Metroid Prime 1 one will be dead.
