Why do you think Sega or Microsoft took the effort to add FPS boost to Unleashed, a 13 year old game? Maybe it didn't take a lot of effort, but it still seems odd, doesn't it? If they did this, does this mean they're seeing if there's interest in an Unleashed re-release or PC port?
Well, let's take stock of what we know:
Sonic Colors Ultimate Edition was the worst-kept secret Sega's had in a long time. Rumors suggest that the game was intended to launch either Fall or Winter 2020, but with covid lockdowns and transitioning to remote work, it became impossible to hit that deadline.
When Colors Ultimate finally launched, it was kind of a mess, and it's one that Sega is still cleaning up months later.
Colors Ultimate was also a mess because of what needed to be done to the game to get it working on modern hardware. The whole entire rendering engine was replaced (for the worse), because some theorize the original Sonic Colors contained code from Nintendo that could not be licensed out. I personally don't know about that and I'm skeptical, but I'm also not knowledgeable enough to say one way or the other.
But I do know that Colors was built off of a massively stripped-down version of Hedgehog Engine. This is actually one of the reasons people are upset with Ultimate Edition, because the new renderer is noticeably inferior. Lightbloom has been downgraded, character shading was changed, global illumination wasn't preserved very well, etc.
Similarly, we can look at past ports of Hedgehog Engine games and see Sega has struggled to preserve that engine across platforms.
Microsoft, on the other hand, does their backwards compatibility stuff themselves. They once said that all developers needed to do was contact them about putting their game up, and it would just go up. Microsoft has a vested interest in backwards compatibility and it's become a major pillar of the Xbox brand, and a significant advantage they have over Sony (and even Nintendo now, once the bastions of backwards compatibility).
It's possible that when Microsoft first started unveiling "Enhanced" BC, where they took 360 games and pushed out the draw distance and improved the framerate, that Sega immediately applied for Sonic Generations and Sonic Unleashed to get FPS boosts. Maybe it just took two or three years for their number to come up in the queue or for Microsoft's engineers to figure it out, or whatever.
Or maybe it's the fact that Sega knew that it would be difficult for them to update these games for themselves, and handing them off to Microsoft like this was a quick, easy way to make them better without having to put tons of their own money and effort in. This way, they avoid another Colors Ultimate situation. Everybody wins, as long as you own a Microsoft platform. And hey, it even ties in to the 30th Anniversary stuff, if you think about it.
I do not think this suggests there will be a proper Unleashed remaster or a PC port in the near future, however. I think a move like this was done specifically so Sega doesn't have to think about that right now.
Maybe if FPS Boost Unleashed really does appreciably move the needle, and proves to Sega there could be greater potential in expanding the game's availability, but I highly doubt that's going to be the case. There may be evidence Unleashed was planned to get a PC port back in the day, but all of that code is a decade old and packed away in a storage unit somewhere.
I think this is probably all we're getting for a while.
