Quoted from Aurich:My guess is yes. They already have the tech for high rez decals (metallic?). If they have to port the game over from Whitestar to SAM it would be some work, but presumably that work would scale to any other Whitestar title they might want to do later.
Beyond that it's pretty much stuff that's set, the work has already been done for the most part. Keeping the line running and money coming in off a couple hundred games sounds pretty good. I imagine they've run the numbers and know where their break even point is and then it's just a matter of trying to forecast the demand beyond that to calculate the risk/reward.
New decals seem like a slam dunk, why the hell not? What would be more work but a killer feature would be upgraded sound. If they port to SAM they should have the memory to handle that, assuming they have the original samples still.
Yes, I'm sure that Stern will do their homework as they always do. But much of what you type is based on the assumption that Stern has already decided to do this, which we don't know.
And if they do: what will the price be? $6k or more? If so, the number that they will sell at that price point will definitely not be very large.
If they pull a rabbit out of their butt and price this at $5k or less? That would be sweet, and even I'd have to consider owning it at that price (I've only owned 3 LOTRs, so owning a 4th version would be a must, right?).