About a year ago, God of War III Remastered was released for Playstation 4 for some reason or other. It’s a great game that feels like it came out yesterday and still performs brilliantly on PS3, so why had it already been given a quick spit polish and shunted out into the wilderness of next-gen?
It’s a common trend within the industry of late. Games released at the tail-end of last-gen are being wheeled out of the nursing home, very lightly wiped with a wet flannel, patted on the backside and told to go make one last big score. No matter the justification publishers come out with that “it’s the true version” of their game (while also being backhanded towards the people who created the original in the process), it reeks of laziness. Cynical, dollar-driven laziness.
Clamoring for the remake of an age-old game which could actually further its legacy is one thing (Final Fantasy 7, Crash Bandicoot, hello), but for a game that is less than five years old? Why? Why spend creative talent on trying to improve something still fresh in the memory when you can move on to a new project entirely? It surely can’t be to squeeze out a few extra frames per second. No, the only thing these rushed remasters are squeezing are the balls of consumers stupid enough to lap them up.
If you’re struggling to believe that re-releasing games for a slightly newer generation is an issue, here are just a few of them to make the geriatric leap from their old man chair over the past year:
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected
Resident Evil: HD Remaster
DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition
Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster
State of Decay Year One Survival Edition
Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered
Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition
Grand Theft Auto V
Metro Redux
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Ridiculous. Most of those games stand up just fine from the first time they were released a couple of hours ago. Trying to catch consumers who are moving between consoles is opportunistic and tiring to see for someone who is sick of remakes and remasters in all media, not just video games. The profit margins are getting tighter and tighter for businesses involved in entertainment with skyrocketing production costs as a result of panicking: “if I throw enough money at this, the public will love it, RIGHT?” Wrong.
Remasters aren’t a hundreds miles away from remakes in many regards. You’re repackaging something that people are familiar with in the hopes of finding a whole new audience and to also ride on the wave of nostalgia that its re-release will invariably create. Studios like Capcom and Square Enix needs to learn from the big screen that this isn’t a good thing; just look at the dizzying cycle of remake, rinse and repeat it’s currently stuck in.
What’s most galling about this unwelcome trend is the pricing. £50 for a game from 2013 that has had the technical equivalent of a new hairstyle, really? Couple this with the relatively low-cost production involved and you’re looking at a bleak pursuit of profit enabled by fans silly enough to fork out full price what is more or less the same game. It’s just shitty practice.
Falling AAA game sales are down to innumerable reasons, but along with a more saturated market than ever before, the majority is sick of seeing slightly different shades of brown and then being tried to sold extra shades of brown as additional content. Publishers viewing gamers purely as walking wallets is what’s so wrong with the industry in the 21st century.
However, it’s up to us, the consumers, to stop developers and publishers from resorting to the churn. A lot of us lap it up – just look at how many were calling for a Skyrim remaster. Plenty of people like what they know and know what they like, which is why we keep seeing these old games pop up again with an extra polish. Just like people like to go watch Michael Bay blow the everloving shit out of the economy of Taiwan for ninety minutes, so too do plenty of gamers like the same old, as much as many of us like to trumpet progress and evolution.
Remasters need to end if the growth of video games which has been taking place over the past few decades is to begin again. The industry is in a strange era in which publishers would prefer to tie you down to a season pass rather than fix bugs in the games they’ve just released. Focusing your business strategy on rehashing relatively new games is a quick way to piss off your userbase and leave us more jaded than we already are.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
