Oh come on, there's a night and day difference in terms of interest in the genre before and after VII. Yes, it had it's fans in the west before VII came out, but it was still incredibly niche. We all love VI and we all love SNES JRPGs but let's not pretend they were breakthrough hits that VII was.
It certainly had a better premisce to JRPGs back then than now really.
I don't know if it's just me who made the mourning of a "true" FF7 remake years ago before the announcement, but that's just the reality of gaming for me. It fucking sucks, but also this is how i see it:
SE is making a shitload of games right now and I don't think they have as many people or as much money as people think they have. They were losing money like freaking crazy during gen 7, with every iteration of XIII selling less than the last. FF XIV being a complete disaster. And a general output of game that was completely weak. Mostly saved by stuff like purchasing Eidos or getting publishing rights.
That, and you have the living cost of Japan which is extraordinarily high. You have SE who's also working on several other projects (Several dragon quests, the upkeep of FF XIV which is now successful, FF XV, Kingdom Hearts 3, numerous 3ds and vita title). Some of that stuff is outsourced.
And finally, well the task of FF7 itself. For all it's value on a sale, it still requires an enormous team and a shitload of assets, because FF7 had just a huge variety of locales, characters and a big story layered over all this. That and a bunch of side quests and minigames. All of that they have to recreate from scratch with the utmost precision if they don't want to piss off the fans, as well as i'm guessing by their statements that they'll also add extra stuff to it (we might end up with a total game that is longer than the base one after all). Going all out on such a mammoth, it's tempting but i'm guessing they still have a business to run at the end of the day and they want to do other things post FF7 (like finishing kingdom hearts, another huge franchise loved by many and has also many expectations).
Sure we can keep comparing to witcher (a project made in a less expensive country which sold more than any previous square title), or xenoblade (helped by nintendo, and less detailed). As I see it though, square hasn't recovered yet from Generation 7.
Also, to be precise: This isn't "good news" to me either but it's also not a reason to get uppity
at this point. My expectations for the remake have always been: Do what you want as long as the content itself, detailing and experience remains the same (meaning I don't really care that the combat is not ATB as long as it's similarily contextualized and I can still use different characters. And I hope that every part of the story is in it at this point otherwise that would be scandalous). And there are genuine worry about episodic, like the pacing, pricing and gating which are all irritating in their own way. On the other, it definitively also has it's advantages. I'll be the first to yell if like they even CUT shit at this point because that would be outrageous with that model. With that, the way they can make it okay is that if each episode is like 25 hours long at LEAST (if we count like 3 episodes, as the total would amount to more than the base game's scenario by about 20 hours)
In any case: without pricing, without actually knowing the content, and without knowing how this thing is going to play, i can't be outraged like the others because I don't have much ground to stand on. But as a decision, while I don't agree with it from a gamer perspective, I can certainly understand from a dev one.
Even though we can agree that SE can take part of the blame at least because of their terrible previous performance that put them in a tight spot to begin with
