I think people miss the point here.
The most noteworthy thing about "Alan Wake" was that it was touted to be a sandbox survival horror game. Before it's release it was revealed to have been re-envisioned as a very linear horror themed shooter with a limited bestiary and rogues gallery. This caused a lot of people to abandon their interest in the title as despite all of the cool promotions, it was NOT the game people wanted.
Now, speaking for myself I liked the idea enough where I bought it anyway, and thought it was okay, but a mere shadow of what it could have been. I also noticed that ironically someone managd to do a decent job with the sandbox horror idea through the game "Deadly Premonition" even if the technology behind that game was dated to say the least. You tack Alan Wake's technology onto Deadly Premonition and that's pretty much what we should have gotten.
Alan Wake apparently flopped because it deserved to flop, and flop hard. Console bundles might have helped the numbers, but yeah the game performed poorly, and deserved to.
The five year development time for Alan Wake is also a joke in of itself, very similar to "Duke Nuken" if you look at what they delivered you have to wonder what they did with that dev time. According to a number of rumors the answer is largely what a lot of people (like me) have been all over the industry for. The Devs (Remedy) basically took the budget and paid themselves with it (human resources being the major development expense) while doing absolutly nothing but living off the money, and then wound up two inches away from the deadline with little beyond conceptual promotional material and pretty much wound up pooping out a game as quickly as possible which was a mere shadow of what was promised. Had they been developing the game for five years chances are we could have seen the Alan Wake we were promised, but I remember speculation that they actually did most of the work over a period of about eight months.
Truthfully, I'd be willing to re-visit the franchise and it's concepts, providing they can deliver something similar to what was originally promised. I'd actually suggest they look at the basic framework of "Deadly Premonition" as an example of what can be done as a budget and develop from there with better technology entirely rooted in this generation.
... also DLC that isn't a glorified product placement gimmick might be nice... just saying.
One thing I will give them 100% praise for though is the hardback book that came with the collector's edition and expanded on the game and it's story and concepts. That was truely neat and honestly is a big part of why I say it doesn't totally blow chips. It's also why I think there was enough thought behind this whole idea that there is still franchise potential despite the first chapter being kind of a disappointment.
